Solo Travel Is a Bit Different Since You Backpacked Around Europe in Your 20s

Our writer is pleasantly surprised by a tour (yes, a tour!) around the Yucatán Peninsula with a group of like-minded strangers.

When my eventual husband and I first clapped eyes on each other in 1999, I swanned into the TV room at our international-student house at Oxford University wearing my roommate’s crocheted rainbow beanie, a BELA LUGOSI’S DEAD tee, and a floor-length satin dress folded down to the waist like a sleepwalking farmer’s overalls. I’d just stepped off a bus, plane, and train from Amsterdam, where I’d taken up with a bunch of expat punks I met in a communal shower. I was 20 years old. 

Three years earlier, I’d been offered a generous scholarship as a reward for my tale of surfing my high-school French across Paris on a solo errand to pay my respects at Jim Morrison’s grave. It’s a dinner-party story I like to tell; the nostalgic, coming-of-age sort of thing people like to hear. There’s initiative in there, a little seaminess, and those questionable fashion choices. 

An unaccompanied young woman wandering into her adult form is not unlike a fledgling that’s hop-tumbled out of its nest and is lurching around on the ground: She’s vulnerable and faintly ridiculous, sure, but you can laugh and probably needn’t intervene. If traveling alone is a little awkward, well, that helps us grow, right? 

The first version of any solo travel narrative is, of course, the one we tell ourselves about ourselves before the trip begins. When I was a fledgling, I focused on one-woman international adventures that implied I was brave and quirky. Graveyards and punks signified those things handily. I know now that I was also wildly privileged to be abroad in the first place and lucky that, say, no one bothered to steal the things I left in the hostel bunk room I shared with two dozen strangers for that week in Amsterdam.  

I’m now a 45-year-old bird, and I recalled that hostel this spring as I settled in with a gaggle of other travel writers at a spectacular hacienda on the Yucatán Peninsula. Like the crew in the bunk room of yore, we were a well-intentioned group of international randos in search of interesting narratives. (My shower was my own, but flashes of skin were charming me all over again; one woman had an upper-arm tattoo of Robert Smith with the lower body of a chicken, à la Baba Yaga’s house, and I wanted to befriend her so badly I might have danced in place a little, like a terrier.) 

Unlike the ’90s teens, we’d been invited to come and contemplate travel with G Adventures, a tour operator rolling out a new collection of trips aimed at solo, usually-female globetrotters ages 30 to 50 (the shoulder season between cruise demographics, if you will). My fellow seasoned travelers kept track of their stuff, and the malfunctioning of some in-room safes was a whole deal; no one was interested in stashing their work laptop under their bed. I also assume none of the journalists were able to hang a camera strap from a tongue piercing like the Amsterdam punks could, but in fairness, I never asked.  

Middle-aged women crawled out of the pandemic with if-not-now-when focus on the bucket-list items we’d never gotten around to addressing. We have travel goals and preferences that our families and friends might not share, and we’d rather not compromise. We expect to leave our money in local hands and pick up our trash; we plan backwards from pee breaks.

Our hosts grokked our demographic in ways even those of us in truly rigorous long-term therapy only catch in glimpses. Their market research had registered all of our inclinations, and they updated their offerings accordingly. Our brand-spanking-new tour was billed as a “premium active adventure,” which translated to a well-curated itinerary of brisk-but-not-grueling travel between cultural and ecological marvels and definitely-not-a-hostel accommodations.

We played hopscotch between spectacular Mayan settlements at Chichén Itzá, Muyil, and Tulum (where our guide’s historical-cultural-commentary-in-transit gave way to walking tours from local experts) and natural jaw-droppers like Yucatán’s cenotes, freshwater sinkholes created as the peninsula’s limestone eroded into otherworldly caverns. The pacing was reasonable, the conversations were scholarly, and the see-you-tomorrows clocked in well before bedtime.

I have long felt that there should be a galloping, compound German word for the simultaneous satisfaction and disappointment one feels when an ostensibly-special-snowflake need is targeted in a way that reveals it to be predictable; how that pleasurable pain washed over me in Mexico! 

If we had a mission-critical bathroom-break need we were to yell KELLY CLARKSON; naturally our road trips were pre-gamed so thoughtfully that it/she never came up. If one of us had a birthday—Significant Birthdays tend to coincide with trips like ours and our hosts quite literally knew it, given the passport-wrangling they managed for us as we checked in and out of four hotels—the group would meet them where they were on the ignoring-versus-commemorating spectrum. (A piñata covers more of that spectrum than one might imagine.) 

Our group first assembled at a rooftop hotel bar in Playa del Carmen, a decidedly developed resort city on the Riviera Maya that’s a convenient hop from the international airport at Cancún and just the sort of scene I avoid when planning my own vacations. But my tourist-town-related misgivings dissolved as my companions-to-be introduced themselves: like me, they were interested in thoughtful, sustainable travel.

I agreed to join the trip because it found me where I live: I am the sort of solo traveler who hauls along bedtime reading about the region I’m exploring (for that occasion, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, a riff on Mayan mythology). I want to swim as much as possible and wander off after animals like Lady No-Kids. My husband doesn’t even own trunks, and there are no torta-sized spiders on any tier of his hierarchy of needs, so a week in Yucatán was the perfect occasion for me to make my own kind of music.

How do I name that tune at 45? As a teenager I built itineraries like mixtapes, complete with in-jokes, showy little sub-themes and, as I started to run out of time, whatever would fit. The travel journals I filled in transit even looked like the DIY cassette sleeves I used to embellish for friends and flings, and I imagine they’ve aged about as well. 

I now settle in for album-length experiences: I’d rather stay in a place long enough to get it properly stuck in my head, and to chart courses that are meaningful rather than performative. I am also more interested in meeting people than ever, but the way in which that happens has changed, too. I’ve lost touch, alas, with the punks from the shower, but the connections I began to make a decade ago, when I was a newbie writer wobbling around on international press trips like three raccoons in a trench coat, have stuck around. 

I realized in Mexico that curated solo travel and the trips I take for work share quite a bit of DNA: showing up to an unfamiliar destination and throwing one’s lot in with a handful of strangers, check. Trusting the itinerary’s load-bearing infrastructure to organizers, then benefiting from local connections and expertise you couldn’t have leveraged on your own, check. (I have learned, for example, that the subterranean, goth-tropical swimming one can do in cenotes, particularly cenotes your schedule-strategist guide has arranged for your group to experience alone, might be the most satisfying swimming there is.) 

This is the point where a solo-travel purist would say, Ah, but if someone is expecting you somewhere then you aren’t really alone. That’s…true? I’ll readily admit that it’s thrilling to navigate a new place by myself, but I will happily swap spontaneity for the opportunity to make new friends. Researchers report that Americans’ close friendships are declining, and that half of us aren’t especially satisfied with the number we’ve got.

Over the course of a week in Mexico, unburdened by the need to mess around with where I would eat, sleep, and explore—or, as would be the case in a much-more-foreign-to-me destination, worry about my safety as a lone gal—I had more than enough time to connect with my companions about career changes, marriage, parenting, family planning, aging parents, you name it. I hope to confide in them, and that they will confide in me, for a long, long time. 

Our trip concluded at an extremely Insta-worthy property in Tulum, where descending from my manicured treehouse-suite made me feel like C-3PO joining an Ewok-led celebration at Burning Man in the Hamptons. Influencers influenced all around us, and sandy outdoor living rooms abounded. I developed a parasocial relationship with the on-site Gratitude Tent, a facility that was never open; I was convinced it was a pneumatic tube that delivered tourists directly to ravenous extraterrestrials. But investigating it took a backseat to wildly-uncharacteristic-for-me, pre-dawn ocean swims with another writer, and our farewell dinner concluded with half of us setting off in search of the beach raccoons rumored to favor the local dumpsters. Find a crew to quest thus with you and I would argue that you’ve approached your solo trip just right. 

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