Solo traveling, even for the short amount of time that I am doing so, gives me lots of alone time to consider being alone. There are multiple schools of thought on being alone. One is the loneliest number. You need to learn to be happy by yourself. You’re nobody till somebody loves you, or something like that. I imagine that, like alcohol, being alone is best done in moderation. Most of us need to be alone some of the time and would prefer to be with people at other times, the ratios shifting depending on our personalities and states of mind in the moment.

I´m currently wrapping up a three-week solo trip through Guatemala (with itsy bitsy stops in Honduras and El Salvador – country number 36!). It was designed as a hybrid fun/work trip where I do a little reporting/research on coffee and climate change stuff while also seeing some of the sights and visiting a friend of mine who I know from Nicaragua but now lives with his fiancée in Guatemala due to all the unrest in Nicaragua.

I’m currently in Flores, a small island town in the north of the country near Tikal, a park with Mayan ruins that is one of those “must-sees” for tourists. In an attempt to meet people, I am staying at what I believe is THE hostel in Flores, a big open space filled with plants and colorful murals and tourists of all (European and North American and Australian) nationalities, English spoken in most corners.

I must admit I’m a sucker for these kinds of places. I love the “vibes” and the intricate twisted-metal jewelry designs that local hippie artisans come to sell to the gringas like me and the over-priced vegetarian food. And I love that I get to meet people. I’m lucky to speak at least enough Spanish to make my way through the country alone, dealing with the occasional bus strike and asking for directions. This means that I don’t really have to follow the tourist trail, but it also means I sometimes find myself in places without these kind of hostels, and end up staying alone in cheap hotels, nice in one way, but it doesn’t provide as many opportunities to meet people.

Traveling around on my own, I’ve thought to myself how difficult it would be to travel in Central America if you didn’t speak Spanish, but I had forgotten what I would call the backpacker’s trail. A string of destinations that almost every backpacker seems to hit, with direct, over-proved shuttles running in between them all, travelers running into one another over and over again in Antigua, Tikal, Semuc Champey, Livingston, and so on.

Last Monday I had a tough travel day. I was leaving Nebaj, the mountain town where my friend Wilder and his fiancée Grace live, and was heading back to Guatemala City where I planned to spend the night and then go the following day to Esquipulas on the Honduran border. It was supposed to be relatively straight-forward: take a microbus from Nebaj to Quiché, available on the corner behind the park, and then from Quiché catch a direct bus to Guatemala City, maybe 5-6 hours overall. When I got to the corner, I was told there were no direct buses to Quiché due to some kind of strike, but the minibus was going to Sacapulas, which was on the way there, and then we could find an onward bus. Also this halfway bus would be the same price as the regular bus usually would have been. Something to due with the strike. But then someone got a phone call and it turned out they weren’t driving to Sacapulas anymore, just some town in-between, same price. So I took that microbus. From that in-between town we all stood around until a guy with a pickup truck offered to take us to Sacapulas (for money. Everyone with a pickup truck was making money that day). Luckily me and one other woman and her friend were sat in the truck itself and all the men went in the bed of the pickup.

From Sacapulas someone with a pickup offered to take us halfway to Quiché but then not enough people wanted to go so he decided it wasn’t worth the money he’d make. Meanwhile, there was another regular microbus in Sacapulas going to Huehuetenango, which wasn’t on the strike route. It was definitely out of the way by a fair bit, but I knew that there were direct buses from Huehuetenango to Guatemala City, whereas I wasn’t sure how long it would even take to get to Quiché and from there I didn’t know if there would be direct buses to Guatemala City. I talked to the drivers and their recommendation was to go to Huehuetenango. So I went.

I arrived in Huehuetenango around 1:30pm, which was almost the time I had originally imagined I would be in Guatemala City, but no matter. The next bus to Guatemala, which was an actual (albeit very cheap old) coach bus was at 2:30, so I used their office’s terrible bathroom and got some food at the station (which wasn’t some big air-conditioned bus station with fast food restaurants but a busy parking lot with some food stands. The bus office had two long uncomfortable benches to wait on). Around 2, the bus company buy announces that due to an accident on the road, our 2:30 bus was cancelled and the next one would be at midnight, 10 hours away. So after sending tragic text messages to Sam about my lot in life, I went to a McDonald’s 15 minutes away, used their WiFi to download Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage to my nook and then spent hours and hours on the bus station bench reading my new book. True to their word, we left around midnight (although they let us on the bus around 9pm so I slept a bit then as well). Once we got to Guatemala City, I just immediately took a taxi to the next bus and went directly to Esquipulas.

At times like that, it would be so ideal to not be alone, and so tempting to just be a part of the backpacker route, taking air-conditioned shuttles where one seat per person isn’t actually one seat per two people on a stuffy microbus. But of course, sticking to the backpacker’s route counts out a lot of places. Nebaj isn’t exactly off the beaten path – a lot of peace corps volunteers and NGO workers live there – but it also isn’t part of the popular backpacker’s itinerary. I don’t know if there are nice shuttle buses that go there (unless you go with a church group and then there probably are. Church groups seem to love Guatemala).

Nebaj was definitely a highlight for me. I got to see a friend and also meet his friends and soon-to-be wife! We went to the house of one of their friends who is American but has lived in Nebaj for three years working with textiles, helping connect weavers to the people who want to sell their weaving. At her apartment, we made Indian food of all things with a group that included Guatemalans, a Nicaraguan, and Americans (and a Swiss person if you count me as Swiss, which I’m not, but sometimes I pretend I am). Then we listened to reggaeton.

Before that I was in Chichicastenango, a town famous to tourists for its market that’s held on Thursdays and Sundays and takes over the whole town. I think tourists generally go there as part of a day trip from Antigua, but I was already nearby having gone to see a training for coffee extension agents nearby and I was able to take a couple buses there (which was also not my favorite bus experience – our first “chicken bus” broke somewhere along the road, they fixed it long enough to get us to another chicken bus, which already had people in it, so they piled us in. Chicken buses are old American school buses, and we were three to a seat, plus people standing, plus a woman trying to walk around and sell eye drops. Not ideal).

In Chichicastenango I stayed in a nice, cheap hotel, bought souvenirs and no doubt paid too much at the market, ate street food to the point of nausea, and when I was tired, I went back to my hotel room and watched episodes of shows I had already downloaded to Netflix. Nights like that are nice too, but I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a friend to eat dinner with in the park or to tell me if they liked the textile I was paying too much for.

That being said, traveling alone now is not the same as traveling alone was 5, 10, 15, etc years ago. I am constantly connected. I have cell service almost everywhere, and I spend downtime texting Sam and other friends, checking Twitter or Facebook, or listening to podcasts – basically doing a lot of the same shit I do when I’m sitting alone at home. It would be a lot harder to travel alone if I really had to live in my loneliness, disconnected from people to talk to when I wanted to talk to them most.

Still, going to Tikal I knew I didn’t want to be alone. To see someplace as impressive as that, I wanted to go with people, even if I didn’t know the people I was going with. When I want to Machu Picchu and the Copan Ruins, I was alone, and while it was nice to just wander around by myself, I also remember wishing I could turn to someone and be like “whoa! Look at that!” Luckily, before the tour I met a girl at the hostel from the Netherlands and we became friendly and did the tour together as part of a group. Stuff like that is why I also can’t discount the big, ridiculous, drunken, direct-bus-filled, no hablo español backpacker experience.

Making friends means someone will take a picture of you in front of ruins!

Back when I first arrived, over two weeks ago, I decided to start my trip at the beach in a town called Monterrico. Definitely not off the beaten trail but also not a big backpacker destination, it’s a black-sand beach that gets a lot of vacationers from Guatemala City. I had read that there was a direct bus from Guatemala City to Monterrico but I never found it and ended up taking two buses to a boat to get there. I spent my first day there alone, dipping my toes into the ocean because it was too rough to swim in, talking to a lifeguard (not an attractive Baywatch kind), swimming in the pool, where it was safe, and eating street tacos. Every evening the hotel did a turtle rescue thing where you paid 10 quetzales to an environmental organization and then you got to release a baby turtle that the organization had helped care for back into the ocean. There I met two guys, an American and Guatemalan who worked together in Antigua, and we drank beers and played darts.

The next night was Guatemalan (and Honduran and Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran…) independence day. I woke up early and took a boat tour through a nature reserve, napped in a hammock, and in the night danced terribly with a mix of tourists and locals and went (briefly) to a club.

Traveling alone means that all these experiences, the good the bad the gringa, are experiences I’ve made for myself. I figured it out for myself, planned it mostly myself, and created something that is very much my own.

(Note: if you ever want to travel with me, please travel with me! I won’t make you take local buses unless you want to take local buses.)

Alone

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