Noun, Verb, Kimchi: Part 9

Written by Clayton Foster

A few years ago, while enjoying a particularly gruesome break-up, I booked a plane ticket via one of those last-minute, book-now, don’t-even-think-it-through-mate websites.  I didn’t think it through, and though I wasn’t familiar with the destination - Norfolk Island - the second word in the name was enough to manifest excited mirages of palm trees and yellow sand in the downbeat synapses of my brain.

In fact, Norfolk Island is a tiny smudge on the map off the East Coast of Australia.  It’s less tropical than it is rural, the population is under 2,000 and what tourism it does have tends to be elderly Australians looking to make use of the island’s tax breaks for jewellery and Lego.  Its flag has a pine tree on it.

So there I was, for a little over a week, sitting by myself in a hotel.  There were no hostels, as there were no young travellers.  Nor, did it seem, were there any other folk my age living on the island - most of the 20 some-things exported themselves to the mainland for university and work.  What little nightlife there was centred around the fish ‘n’ chip shop and the Chinese takeaways.  It was pretty enough but for someone looking to forget their grief in a flurry of mojitos and coconut-odoured suntan oil, it wasn’t quite what I expected. 

Over the course of the week there were days where I realised I hadn’t opened my mouth to speak to anyone at all.  There were few distractions - cellphones didn’t work and the internet was too sparse and expensive to consider.  For the first two or three days I sat, lay and wandered in a dull haze of self-pity and the endlessly cyclical parade of thoughts, questions and dark fantasies that the newly single know only too well.  Then, around the fourth day or so, the proverbial cloud unexpectedly lifted, I could once again see a clear path from where I was to where I wanted to be, and I was a new man.  Thanks to the isolation and the complete inability to distract myself from my own brain, I had thought my way out of the situation.  All was well again.  Thanks, Norfolk Island.

I tell this miniature tale of grief and redemption to underline an idea that I’m naturally inclined towards: time spent in solitude is a good thing, and travelling solo - and so removing yourself from all distractions and familiar comforts - even better.  Seventeenth Century philosopher Blaise Pascal declared that, "all of man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone" (translations argue whether “man’s troubles” should be replaced with “man’s miseries” or even “evil in the world”).  I like to think that, were he only born a few hundred years later, he would have said something along the lines of, “book a ticket to somewhere where you don’t know anyone, and just walk around a bit.  Seriously guys, it’s awesome.”

The truth is, of course, travel styles are as personal as travel journals, and whether one chooses to explore the seven seas with companions or with only the pack on their back is completely up to them.  In fact, I’ve discovered from numerous discussions with other travellers that this is a conversation that must be treated with due delicacy.  Travellers tend to be sensitive about their choices and everyone seems justifiably bored with the hoary old “authentic travel versus tourism” pretension.  Solo travellers, for their part, are wary of being regarded as antisocial oddballs, while those preferring to travel in groups or with companions don’t want to be accused of being inauthentic or closed off to the true experience of “life on the road.”

I tend towards solo traveling, by nature of my temperament as opposed to any conscious preference, and certainly without deriding those who choose differently.  Travel to me is exploratory and spontaneous; the thrill of a trip about to be undertaken is, for me, akin to the raw potential of a blank page.  Every choice committed to, every direction taken and every mistake made - of which there are many - are mine and mine alone.  I always hope that I’ll return from a lengthy trip somehow different, succumbing to the old myth that travel can encourage growth, Hemmingway-style, and the only way I can imagine achieving that is by doing it without the expectations of those who know me well.  When I brought this up recently over a dinner with other travellers recently, one smiled tightly and said, “I like who I am, why would I want to change?”

It’s indeed a debate with little consensus, amongst travellers themselves, and amongst those throughout history who have given the matter serious thought.  In 1854, American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau published Walden, an account of his two year stay of isolation in a self-built cabin in Massachusetts.  The work became a manifesto on the importance of self-dependence, and spending time alone.  Thoreau declares that a thirst for solitude can lead to fulfilment and happiness inaccessible to those who depend too heavily on the companionship of others; "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Modern day essayist and pop-philosopher Alain de Botton underlines the value of solo travelling in his treatise The Art of Travel.  Like Thoreau, de Botton lists inner exploration as an important benefit of outer exploration and argues that it is easier done without companionship.  Companions with which you share history, De Botton asserts, can limit the freedom of your experience and the potential for personal experimentation and growth.  Summarising an example De Botton offers, imagine you’re standing with a partner or friend in some exotic locale, looking at a bridge.  “My, what a beautiful bridge,” you say.  Your companion looks at you with mild surprise, “I didn’t know you liked bridges”, and in that small moment, someone else’s expectations of you, based on history and accumulated experiences, have put you back in your defined role and quietly squashed any attempt by you to express a previously unrecognised or undeveloped facet of your personality.  Kind of like how every time you return home, your mother still can’t accept that you can cook or do your own washing.

Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, he of The Alchemist fame, has long expounded upon the virtue of the brave solo traveller, although he unexpectedly seems to reverse his stance in one of his later books, The Zahir.  The Zahir features lengthy paragraphs detailing the protagonist walking through cities both familiar and exotic, espousing the idea that no-one can truly be happy alone, and that the human spirit requires another with which to share experiences.

This particular argument is one of the most common in defence of travellers who prefer to travel with company, behind perhaps only issues of safety.  An experience, it is argued, is more enjoyable when it is shared, and after the travelling is done memories that can be accessed by more than one person are easier to keep alive.  This is a difficult point to counter, and a solo traveller must make peace with the fact that what they’re seeing, feeling and thinking is for them and them alone. Luckily, experiences and memories are not casino chips  inherently valueless until you cash them in with someone else: to any greater or lesser extent we’re all pretty much traipsing around this life by ourselves, and a greater reliance on ourselves to enjoy and treasure experiences can surely be nothing but healthy.

What about the other elephant in the hostel room: loneliness.  Yes, it strikes and it sometimes strikes hard.  Travelers’ trails, bars and hostel common rooms are dotted with solitary travellers looking up from their journals and copies of Into the Wild in the hope of making contact with someone, if only for a few minutes.  Fortunately finding a friend for an hour or a few days is easier when travelling than when in the real world, and is often a matter of simply asking to share a table or borrow a Lonely Planet.  During the moments when solitude threatens to become alienating, I think back to Norfolk, and I think about Pascal, and I just try to get through it.  It may just be a matter of perspective, after all, or even semantics. German-American philosopher Paul Tillich surmised that “language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”

This is all well and good in the lofty realm of the abstract but regardless of how we might like to paint ourselves as they mythic lone wolf conquering the world on our own, sometimes we all need a little help from our friends.  This was underlined to me recently during my time on another tiny island, Don Det, in the south of Laos.  Through a series of unfortunate coincidences and bad decisions, I somehow managed to lose (or get stolen) a large sum of money and all my cards.  Stuck on a dusty piece of mud with no public establishments and a population in the low hundreds, I could have been well and truly stuck if not for the quick and generous assistance of a group of friendly travellers, the most helpful of whom I had known for less than 24 hours.

So it would be disingenuous for me to not end this ode to solitude with the admission that no man can afford to be an island all the time.  Which is probably fortunate, because I think I’m about done with islands for a while.