5 Tips for a Nervous Traveller
For the insatiably curious, travelling is exciting, exhilarating, and ultimately life-changing. But the same reasons that make travel one person’s holy grail can cause others to feel overwhelmed, hesitant and doubtful. Add to this emotional mix the new complications of Covid, and we can find ourselves wondering whether we really can imagine going exploring again.
Starting with Covid, this post talks through five common stressors that I’ve observed over the years, and some perspectives on how to tackle them.
If you need a travel-focused “just do it” pep talk, this is the list for you.
The Complications of Pandemic-Era Travel
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to getting back to travelling, as everybody is prepared to take different risks. But even if you can’t wait to get back out there, the bureaucracy and hoop-jumping is enough to make anyone’s head spin. This is where travel consultants come into their own, as they can not only help to keep you abreast of rules in the region you’re headed to, but they can also handle everything if you need to come back.
Laura Dean, who owns The Travel Design Company, suggests that Covid-era travel may not be that different from travelling anywhere that requires a bit more forethought, even in ‘normal’ times: “My advice would be the same as it always is for people who travel to reasonably exotic places - be prepared and be sensible. Make sure you have good travel insurance that will cover you in the event that something unplanned happens, and plan your trip to fit your risk tolerance level. Visiting a second city or staying in a villa are easy ways to help with this.”
Personally, I’m less apprehensive about a destination, than being cooped up on transport. In the near future, I will feel more comfortable in a car & train carriages, where you can open windows and have more fresh air, and so I will prioritise trips that are accessible by road or rail. Work out which elements are making you feel hesitant, and find a way to tackle them one-by-one.
Personal Safety on the Road
There still seems to be an errant (in my view) misconception that when you go abroad, you’re stepping into this vast unknowable expanse where anything could happen and you’re constantly in some kind of low-level danger. If your idea is hiking solo through the Amazon with few provisions, no guide, a poor fitness level and no understanding of venomous snakes, then you might be right. But… that’s probably not your plan, is it.
The same personal safety rules that apply to you in your home country will apply to you everywhere. Yes, language barriers can cause challenges (but they are also easily overcome), and there are cultural nuances, but navigating them is more a case of learning preemptively about etiquette so that you don’t accidentally cause offence.Female solo travellers may have a different set of considerations in certain contexts (I’ll share more about my own experiences and tactics in a later post), but I would say you’re better off questioning where these fearful misconceptions come from.
It comes down to a personal decision about mindset. The parameters of your life can be determined by your curiosity, or your fear. The choice is entirely yours.
“The parameters of your life can be determined by your curiosity, or your fear.”
3. Prevaricating on Choosing the “Right” Trip
If you’re anything like me, your travel list is as long as your TBR pile, and choosing one adventure over another feels slightly heart-rending, which can lead you to procrastinate on choosing anywhere at all. Then there are the specifics of what you do when you are at your destination: you don’t want to go all that way, only to return and find out that you missed out on a key experience you’d have loved.
Doing your research properly will pay dividends (if you’re looking to dip your toe into a destination to see if it might be a good fit for you, our travel boxes could be the perfect place to start).
Once you know what interests you, there’s only one way I would cut through the noise of instagram posts and bucket-list blogs: working with a travel consultant. Our generation loves to DIY a trip, but I think this is because there’s a misconception that it’s more expensive to book through a travel consultant (it’s not; in fact, they will normally save you money), and because it’s thought that travel consultants sell “packages” (the good ones don’t).
It is true, however, that not all travel agents are created equal. Generally speaking, they fall into two camps:
The first is the classic travel salesperson. To their credit, they’re able to take a job off your plate, get you good room rates and save you the (not inconsiderable) amount of faff involved in booking a trip, never mind all the trouble if it turns out to be cancelled or postponed for unexpected reasons. Don’t be fooled by the term “luxury” though: many well-known “luxury” travel agents still piece together the same cut-and-paste itineraries, albeit to 5* resorts and dreamy Indian Ocean hideaways.
The second is the true travel consultant. These are the people who’ve hiked the trail, stayed with the nomads, visited the gallery, found the tucked-away restaurant & met the artisans in the neighbouring village. They’ll suggest things you’d never have imagined, and design something around you & your passions. PLUS they can do all of that jazzy money-saving, time-saving, sanity-saving itinerary stuff, too. Specialists in the region you’re visiting are also most likely to know about responsible travel options.
A final note on working with travel professionals - I’ll personally be really interested to see how the trend of DIY booking shifts when people start having to negotiate piecemeal with airlines, accommodation, experience providers, insurance companies and restaurant reservations if they have to process a last-minute Covid cancellation.
4. Getting Buy-In From Other People
Depending on your stage of life and your circumstances, this could mean anything from convincing your family to give you their blessing for your first big solo trip, to getting your partner on the same destination page as you, to finding the right friends to travel with. Your approach will vary accordingly, but here are some things I have learned from my own experiences which may help you strengthen your resolve, if nothing else:
I learned that if you are constantly waiting for other people to want to do the same things as you, you will be waiting forever. I’ve been on short breaks with friends, but nobody shared my wider travel ambitions so I just got on and did it. Whereas they all had partners and different priorities, I was single for over a decade, and I had a choice: do I mope about and delay my dreams, hoping that maybe one day someone would come along and share them, or do I get on and do it regardless? I chose myself. I chose to live.
When it came to destinations where I felt safer in a group (such as India when I was 23, where my previous experiences even with my family had shown me I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable as a solo blonde female), or when I simply knew I’d want company (like in China after having been on the road solo for nearly two months), I sought group adventures where you didn’t need to know anybody in advance, as you’d get along with the other like-minded travellers in your group.
If you’re old enough to safely travel the world, you’re old enough not to let your family stop you. I was lucky to have been raised by parents who love travel and who’ve taught me a lot of life-skills through it. Nevertheless, a lot of first-timers get put off by the adverse reactions of their families. I can almost guarantee that these families will have one thing in common with each other: they themselves will never have travelled. People are afraid of what they do not know or understand. It takes a lot to accept that maybe you’ll never meet with approval or appreciation from some of your closest family members, but I can assure you that once you come back with your tales and photographs, they’ll start to dream a little bigger…
...Or not, and that’s OK too. Whilst I was living my best life in Thailand, I was horrified to learn that I was none other than the object of pity being discussed at one point during a family wedding (“...she’s had to go all the way to Asia just to find work...”) You learn to accept the limitations of other people’s perspectives, and you have to remind yourself of the validity of your own experience. Others don’t have to understand your life choices in order for you to thrive within them, and just because your achievements, courage and capabilities are invisible to some people, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
5. General Lack of Confidence
What is holding you back? If you know that you want to explore off the beaten track, and seize the day to visit those places you always said you would, the only things that could possibly stop you would be lack of funds, or lack of self-belief.
We are more likely to regret the things we didn’t do, than the things we did. I know it’s a cliche, but they are cliches for a reason!
If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s that you never know what is around the corner. All we can do is make the most of the time and opportunities we have, and live according to our values (rather than our fears). Do you want your life to be a series of “I nearly did this” and “I could’ve done that”? Incidentally, if you speak German, there’s a spoken word pep-talk written by Julia Engelmann that went viral several years ago (I’m not sure how I got this old already), and which still whips me into shape when I can feel myself losing a bit of oomph.
Ultimately, taking the plunge to travel (especially when we’re talking about “travelling” rather than “holidays” - I’ll go into that another time) is always going to take you out of your comfort zone in one way or another - but that is how we grow and thrive.
So, tell me: do you feel ready to travel?