Women's dilemma: Is Solo Travel Worth the Risk?
By Dawn MacKeen
Part 1
The irony of it all was how beautiful it was: mountains covered with Christmas trees, decorating the inclines like ornaments; hiking trails for miles; cabins with smoke pluming from their chimney tops; bright stars lighting the sky; the sound of cows mooing and clanking their bells.
Inside one of those cabins, on a bottom bunk in the middle of all this serenity, Laurie Gough's stomach was turning. First she heard the unzip of the pants, then the big leather boots dropping on the floor, one by one. "Move," he commanded in a thick Italian accent. And then she could feel him lying on her, all six feet of him, the strong body she once found attractive metamorphosed into something else.
"I kept saying, 'No, go away, I want to sleep.' I had my knees up to my chest and was trying to kick him away with my boots, but he was clenching both my wrists back over my head. As soon as you don't have your arms, you are so powerless."
Chico -- the suave, handsome man she met in northern Italy -- raped her that night. He twisted her trust in other people and shaped it into a seething ball of anger. Tore a hole deep inside her.
"I was in shock, I was so filled with anger and betrayal and mad at myself for getting into the situation. I kept thinking, 'How did this happen, how could I attract such a dark force?'"
At one point or another, a woman traveling alone usually runs into a situation like the one Gough did that afternoon while sitting next to a lake looking at a map. A man comes up to her and asks her to go on a hike into the mountains. She decides to go. Why not, she thinks. Locals know the area better than tourists anyway, and she has taken chances on strangers before -- traveled for a couple of weeks with a guy she met in Morocco, spent the night at some guy's house in London, talked until dawn in a Grecian campground with a backpacker who came up to her from out of the shadows -- and everything had turned out OK.
But this time it's different. This guy leads her far up into the mountains, to a point where the trails splinter off in unknown directions and turning back isn't an option. They end up staying overnight in an abandoned cabin, and he traps her there for a day.
Ironically enough, what attracted -- and still attracts -- Gough and many women to traveling alone are moments like the one when she first encountered Chico: that split second after he asked her to go hiking, right before she said yes or no, when she had the freedom to decide on her own what she wanted to do. Did she want to take a risk or not? She didn't have to ask anyone else; she didn't have to consider how her traveling companion wanted to spend that day. Part of the allure of traveling alone is having the option to just go, to take chances. You can skip that museum of 16th century paintings and spend all morning in the cafe next door, or you can bypass the vaunted tourist town and ride to the end-of-the-line village not even mentioned in your guide -- or you can decide to let a local lead you on a hike into the mountains.
But when the flip side of having so much freedom is so much pain, is it worth it to travel alone as a woman? Do the rewards merit the risks? Fear is still the No. 1 factor preventing women from traveling alone. It's what separates women's travel from men's; it's what keeps women from ever truly answering these questions -- because they never take the trip.
For Gough, who experienced one of the worst things that can happen to a woman, and for the ever increasing number of women actually traveling alone, the answer to both questions is yes. It is worth it; it's like no other type of travel. Your senses soak up the rawness of the environment, from the slight rustle of the wind to the smell of pine trees after the rain. "When you're traveling alone, all the impressions, everything you experience, is unfiltered by anyone else's comments or preconceived ideas," says Marybeth Bond, editor of "Travelers' Tales: A Woman's World," a collection of travel stories by women. "So you are bombarded with everything. This allows you the freedom to experience the world unfiltered. The result is that you are living intensely, you are very much more tuned into your own impressions because you aren't bouncing them off anyone else."
Part 2 of this article will appear in the January 2000 issue of
World Travel Health... Stay tuned!
This article first appeared in Salon.com at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.
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