I travel for work and for pleasure. I like to bring a camera along wherever I travel; it makes me see even short business trips as new experiences. I love food of all sorts and experiencing new cultures. I always travel solo and occasionally by bicycle.
My second day at Petra I got to see some of the main sights in miraculous, wonderful solitude. The first day I’d been harassed by would-be guides and vendors and lost amid throngs of tourists. On my second day, I got to the gate at 6:30, when it opened, and scurried down the Siq to find Petra virtually empty, as if I’d stumbled upon it by accident. I love to talk to others when I travel, but I also like time to reflect and to be alone. Petra is a phenomenal place for that, since it is so stunning that it takes the mind a while to absorb it all. I ate my breakfast atop the Great Temple, then climbed the 800 steps to the monastery where I was one of three people there. I sat on a rock overlooking the Monastery for a long time, absorbing it, imagining it when Petra was a huge and thriving metropolis. It was an amazing day.
Solitude is one of my favorite parts of travel, and something I always seem to overlook the importance of when I am planning a trip. After all, isn’t the point of travel to go somewhere new, to experience a different culture and new foods and to see how life really is? And aren’t we, as travelers, practically obligated to savor every moment and experience as much as we possibly can?
I always travel alone which surprises many people. People first ask “don’t you get lonely?” and I respond that there are people everywhere to talk to, but that I meet a wider variety without a constant sidekick. Sometimes it is in fact lonely, especially on holidays or after a bout of food poisoning, or over dinner, but to me it is offset tremendously by the freedom. Part of the appeal of the freedom is simply the selfish free-will; deciding on a whim to sleep in, or wake up early, picking and choosing the parts that appeal most to your individual path. But all of that, really, is superficial and easily negotiated. When I really notice the lack of anyone familiar is upon seeing something truly spectacular, whether unique in the world or utterly common.
Wow.
With a companion, it is often wonderful to have another face to reflect the beauty you are experiencing in the world at that very moment, perhaps to prove that it is even real. But the more I experience the world the more I also find the joy in solitude, in seeing a sunset that no one else will see precisely the same way, in shuffling through my own thoughts until everything I have worried about, wondered about or pondered is well thought through. I often think fondly back on the third-day-in-the-wilderness afternoons in Patagonia where my mind was so empty I took to counting to move my feet along, and the beauty of the world was simply reflected in my eyes.
I spent many days hiking in beautiful solitude through Cappadocia. Meeting others occasionally, but only in passing, and pausing around every corner to gape in wonder. This photo is from one evening, just after sunset, on the outskirts of Göreme.
