What I Learned From My First Solo International Trip
Traveling, learning, and occasionally stumbling
Webster’s Dictionary defines velleity as “The lowest degree of volition… a slight wish or tendency.” And throughout most of my life, that’s what the idea of travel was for me. It was a concept floating out of reach — intriguing yet never quite enticing enough to leap for.
These past few years, I’ve felt a growing wanderlust well inside me. As 2024 arrived, I could resist the temptation no more. I needed to book a ticket somewhere — anywhere. And that anywhere I landed on happened to be Belize. Travel would no longer remain a velleity hovering loosely in the back of my mind.
Belize wasn’t a completely arbitrary destination. It was tropical enough to escape the brunt of a blustery Pennsylvania January, close enough not to throw my schedule into disarray, and English-speaking enough not to wander its streets in total confusion.
Among the most interesting things I discovered from my time spent traveling were some of the oddities of tourist towns. There’s a liminal component to life in those bureaus where the population is in near-constant flux. In the absence of constancy, people are more open to new friends and new experiences.
While there’s a beauty to the openness, there can be an inauthenticity to it, too. There’s an implicit understanding that the connections made in those distant cities and towns aren’t always meant to stand the test of time. In travel, there’s a tendency to drift intimately in and out of each other’s lives as though we’re each a part of a primal social experiment.
The greatest sense of realism and immersion when abroad is most accessible away from the biggest tourist hot spots. In tourist towns and at the attractions they encircle, there’s a candor and culture we sometimes lose. When the people who staff each business need to tend to an unceasing conveyor belt of visitors and sightseers from near and far, it feels commercial.
For the inexperienced nomad like myself, there was solace in knowing that there was almost always another tourist within a burrito’s toss. There was safety in the understanding that I was rarely too far gone to be saved, and that the guides and locals in these towns are used to Westerners and Europeans even more lost and clueless than myself.
One of the great lessons from the trip was learning to resist the urge to cater my time away around a country’s tourist attractions. Even while a lot of the fun I had in Central America was seeing the mandatory sights — the caves, mountains, jungles, ruins, and tropics — a lot of the joy I found was in floundering.
Being regimented can detract from the feeling of freedom. It’s in going with the flow that most travelers seem happiest.
When I went to Israel in 2022, it was without knowing another person. But because I spent the entire duration of my time there with a tour group, there was a sense of truly experiencing the culture that I missed out on as an unfortunate result. Our time there felt cushioned like a children’s roller coaster. It left us shielded from truly facing the highs and lows that can come from time in another part of the world.
Being restricted to the group setting limited our capacity to explore individually. It ended up feeling like something more akin to a high school field trip than it did my first time in another country without a familiar face in sight. For that reason, I struggle to talk about the journey as my first solo international venture without a certain asterisk beside it.
But in Belize, the only guard I granted myself was my luggage, laptop, and a cellphone with access to the world. Though service was spotty once I made it to Mexico, it was never so non-existent that I felt in danger. At worst, it created a barrier between me and Google Translate. But with my three years of faded high school Spanish, I was never so hopelessly lost in my interactions that I couldn’t fumble through them with some circuitous synonyms and hopeful guesswork.
Among the most notable things I learned while traveling are the more common truisms people point toward. I learned that seeing new cultures and ways of life is eye-opening. I learned that many travelers (myself included) take their at-home luxuries for granted.
And while Mexico and Belize are hardly in the heart of the third world, it’s a curious novelty for first world foreigners to wonder about the safety of their drinking water.
It’s an eye-popping sight to see houses standing on lopsided stilts. The blocks worth of front yards turned into effective junkyards are an unfamiliar sight for many Americans. Some of the lots have trash strewn across their property. And on quieter, less-serviced streets, the people are hamstrung into setting their garbage on fire. Some yards are receptacles of broken-down cars and school buses brimming with weather-worn storage items.
Yet, there’s a bucolic sort of beauty that comes to fruition the further you drive from the standard holiday destinations. It’s often in those places where poverty runs most deeply that culture is most plainly felt.
One of the most wonderful things about traveling is having the opportunity to challenge our conceptions of “normal.” Spending our entire lives within the confines of a single country or region can confine us in our worldview. We start to consider the features and oddities of our homes as humdrum and irreproachable.
Seeing the world, we’re afforded not only the opportunity to meet the residents of faraway places, but all of the other wanderlusting vagabonds that weave between them. Speaking to my friend Joup from the Netherlands, I learned that neither religion nor sports are very big in his country. He also explained the unassailable logic behind using what Americans call “military time” as the law of the land. And now each time that I needlessly clarify PM and AM, I see how life would be so much simpler if I were only born across seas.
I had the opportunity to revel with a new British friend over the distinctions between our vocabularies. We marveled and recoiled at our divergent terminologies for bathrooms. And we commiserated about the words that had remained solemnly secluded on separate sides of the Pacific.
Moving between states within my own country can introduce certain cultural shifts. Between coasts, they can even be quite stark. But traveling to different countries has a way of bringing just about all of our standards and customs into review. We see that the holidays and practices and languages in alien countries are every bit as arbitrary as our own.
The routines we consider ingrained as concrete fall in other countries. Their people erect walls and routines of their own. Currencies change. Foods are different. The sirens of police cars reverberate the walls of foreign cities to the tune of unfamiliar melodies.
Breaches of conduct on one side of the ocean are signs of respect on the other. The very way we count the fingers on our hands varies across seas and borders.
Every region cultivates its own idea of what “normal” is. And in the wildly varied interpretations we’ve each arrived at, we see we’re all weirdos. We get a glimpse into the reality that life could take a million different forms.
There are few locales left on earth that we haven’t found a way to contort into something familiar. The most hellish landscapes can be a home. Even the airless vacuum of space is no longer beyond our bounds. Far enough from the life we know, the very concepts of up and down lose their meaning.
From hurricane-battered islands and snow-covered mountain tops to Siberian tundras and desiccated deserts, people have made lives in the most menacing of places.
And if I can get even one window into the infinity of other ways life could be, then travel is worth the time. Velleities are best abandoned and dreams are best pursued.
My first solo trip was to southern Germany. I was 18. I’d had six years of German, 7th through 12th grades. Suddenly I was in Germany, but couldn’t understand a word. They were speaking a thick Bavarian dialect.
All these years later, and that’s become my second home, base for my solo travel throughout the rest of Germany and Europe.
My Chai trip to Israel was also solo. Ten days in Jerusalem (with side trip to Tel Aviv, where I got to sit in Ben-Gurion’s chair), eight days driving myself from Masada to Kibbutz Ein Gedi up through the West Bank to Gesher to Kinneret to Kfar Blum. And on to Z’fat, Ma’asada on the Golan Heights, Tel Dan, Metullah, and Qiryat Shemonah.
Whether Germany, Israel, Romania, Hungary, or Austria, for me the secret of solo traveling is communicating. Even without knowing their language. Funniest communication story: In Orenburg, Russia (on the Kazakhstan border) landed in a restaurant. Assumed menu would be in Russian and either German or English. German, because Orenburg was a German settlement. But no. And the waiters couldn’t speak either German or English.
Walked from table to table, looking at what people were eating. I’d point to that salad, that meat, that vegetable. I asked in English, “Ice cream?” Everyone in the restaurant started laughing. “ICE CREAM!”
One of my best meals ever. Such camaraderie, unexpected.
🌹🌻🌸💐💚💜❤️🌼😍🥰