Emily Brewster explores the female experience of solo travel, recounting her own backpacking trip to educate others on her experience and deconstruct preconceptions of women travelling alone.

That bleak third lockdown was an unsettling time as I worked seven days a week in hope of salvaging a cathartic experience from those joyless months. Most of the world’s borders were locked shut, including our own, so prospects of travel were unpromising. As a friend and I scoured the globe for eligible destinations for our gap-year trip, Mexico, with its borders wide open, became the answer to all our worries. But when we excitedly informed our parents of the trip we’d saved so hard for, eyebrows were raised. The thought of two young, white women travelling here clearly aroused concerns about safety for my family, despite us not knowing anyone to have even been, let alone to have encountered danger there.

The real panic for my family came when, almost four months later, my companion and I bid each other farewell and I began solo-travelling north to catch my flight home. By this point, I felt so accustomed to the country and its culture, and having met so many fantastic, female solo travellers, no part of me was concerned for my safety. This period alone was, in fact, an absolute highlight for me. As an independent traveller, there is absolute freedom to move wherever and whenever you choose, awarding you total control over your experience. Unfortunately, for my friends and family this was a time of sleepless nights as I, a nineteen-year-old girl “with no one to look after her”, sauntered around the enormous country. When I returned home and was told of the anguish this had caused, I was genuinely astonished. After all, I hadn’t been alone. Every hostel I checked into had a multitude of fantastic fellow travellers who invited me to dinners, daytrips and nights out with them. I often bumped into familiar faces I had met months earlier and continued to experience the incredible country with them. Women of all ages and nationalities that I’d befriended had travelled solo across the world, including in Mexico and Central America, and praised it enthusiastically. When I asked these women whether they had encountered danger or uncomfortable situations, almost all shrugged and said ‘at times, when I’d been acting stupidly. But isn’t that just the same as at home?’ So why, when solo female travel in the Global South is so common and well-established, does it inspire so much anxiety for loved ones and wider society?

Sadly, the answer can primarily be boiled down to legacies of colonial xenophobia buried deep  within the British psyche. Colonisation and empire were justified by European powers like Britain as missions to ‘civilise’ people who, operating under different social and intellectual frameworks, were considered ‘primitive’ and intellectually inferior. This narrative facilitated the stereotype that the colonised man of colour was sexually violent and therefore a threat to white women. Though social attitudes towards people of colour have progressed from this ludicrous fallacy, arguments presented against a British woman like myself solo-travelling in the ‘Global South’—nations in Central and South America; Asia; and Africa—still carry traces of this colonial fear. I asked myself, would such trepidation be felt about me exploring Spain alone, Mexico’s former imperial power? Probably not.

I promise I am not ignorant to women’s increased vulnerability by travelling alone. To embark on such an adventure she must take more precautions than her male counterpart, keeping her wits about her. But when 97% of British women admit to having been sexually harassed in their life, according to UN Woman UK in 2021, staying at home in Britain is by no means a guarantee of our safety. Women are regrettably so accustomed to acts of harassment that our guards are constantly up, whether we are walking home alone at night in Bristol or Mexico City. The fears that society harbours for women travelling solo, or sometimes at all, in so many wonderful places threaten to limit what we can experience compared with men. During my four brilliant months in Mexico, the large majority of men that I met had been victims of crime at some point, regardless of nationality. In contrast, I had only heard of two young women mugged after being scammed trying to buy drugs—they were in no way sexually assaulted. It is my own experience of a notoriously ‘dangerous’ country which has made me question society’s belief that the ‘Global South’ is unsafe for women wanting to backpack alone. If anything, the additional danger we face every day in the UK has prepared women to be far shrewder solo travellers than men!

The realisation that no one, except by choice, is actually alone whilst they solo travel is one that we must take comfort in to encourage women to take these wonderful journeys. So long as she informs herself of any risks and takes necessary precautions, travelling solo will be the most rewarding, character-developing experience. As I plan my next trip, travelling solo around the rest of Central America (a proposal which turned my mother’s stomach), I wish anyone else with similar intentions the most wonderful time.