Forget Eat, Pray, Love: Way Better Reasons to Travel Alone | Hilary Brewster | TEDxMarshallU

[Music] foreign [Music] because my parents divorced when I was an infant I didn't grow up looking at traditional Family Photos sure there were baby pictures of me with my mom and her parents but old pictures of my parents dating or at their wedding were pretty much non-existent instead my mom's faded Polaroids were of her travels I grew up with her legendary stories of hiking the Grand Canyon somehow stumbling into a job on a Dude Ranch in Arizona or traveling back and forth from the border of El Paso Texas to Juarez Mexico to eat and Shop my favorite story though is about the time she saved her waitressing money for two years to backpack in Europe for a summer she and a friend Linda who came from a family with money took a ship across the Atlantic ready for an adventure but a few days after they landed Linda was so homesick she beckoned for her dad to come get her upon his arrival in Hamburg Germany he declared that my mom should pack her things too because he was taking them both of them oh no my mom said I worked hard for this trip and I'm staying thus began her two-month solo trip through Holland Austria Germany and Switzerland in the late 1960s in 2016 scientists discovered the 7R variant of the drd4 gene or what they called the Wanderlust Gene is my love of traveling especially alone from all of those faded photographs or from biology or maybe it's because like every other white woman in 2006 I read Eat Pray Love and I thought I I want to do that until we learned that Elizabeth Gilbert struck a book deal before she left on her iconic trip which kind of sullies the whole Enterprise we'll never know and it's irrelevant what matters is that I do love it and traveling especially alone has allowed me to more than any other experience to figure out myself traveling alone forces you to figure out who you are as a person so much research on gender shows that from a young age girls and women are socialized to compromise in our relationships be they professional romantic or even platonic of course compromise is part of how Society functions or should function but traveling alone means you don't have to I went to Greece with two of my absolute best girlfriends they wanted to get drunk on the beach I wanted to go to a tomato canning Factory I am the kind of person who wants to go to a tomato canning Factory traveling alone means going to the biggest Ikea in the world just to see it or doing karaoke at the Abba Museum because you not so secretly love Disco or on a day when you're tired of museums and culture taking yourself to see Magic Mike 2 at a mall in Denmark when you have limited time and presumably limited money unless you also have a book deal it forces you to consider your values how will you spend that time and money one decides but you not worrying about what other people want to do or when or for how long is honestly one of life's greatest treasures of course traveling solo means you also have to do all the grunt work every flight bus train accommodation walking route Excursion booking restaurant review that's on you and Google Maps seriously how did my mom go to Europe for two months in 1967 as a nixonial I remember time before smartphones and I even traveled without one after I graduated college but not lugging around a guidebook or a map or God forbid having to ask a local for directions is definitely an upgrade till you lose phone more on that later the downside is that there's nobody to watch your backpack when you have to pee at the airport or to let you back into your hostile room when it accidentally shuts behind you on your way to the shower you'll figure out whether you'd rather eat dinner with a book or make small talk with strangers you'll shift from happiness and Solitude to loneliness several times during a trip even during the day sure you can still connect with friends back home with technology but it's not the same if you didn't really know or like yourself before you left you'll either figure it out or be miserable the whole time of course being free from your typical Social Circle and way of life also makes you face some hard truths about yourself my most of my friends and all of my ex-boyfriends would probably describe me as a stubborn introvert who is happy to have a single glass of wine and be home in bed at 11. yet sometimes in the name of loneliness or wanting to fit in even the most independent among us will go along to get along even when we think we are old enough to stand up in the face of peer pressure when I went to New Zealand I met up with some other solo Travelers and they liked to drink in the name of making friends and fitting in I drank way more during those three weeks than I would have liked I never got as crazy as some of them did partially because I was in my 30s but I went out way more often than I would have alone which would have been zero my friends would also probably describe me as having some pretty hard line personal and political stances but I also figured out that sometimes letting go in the name of Adventure is worth it I've been a vegetarian almost my entire life but in Cambodia I relaxed a little in order to eat bugs a whole bunch of us went to a fine dining bug restaurant in Siem Reap unlike the more in your face novelty of a fried scorpion on a stick like the street vendor sell here the dishes were prepared by a French chef I ate roasted tarantula which tastes like liver ant stuffed spring rolls and other Delicacies prepared with the tiniest creatures Among Us on our way to Phnom Penh I ate grilled rat it's a pretty common snack especially in rural Cambodia where rice Farmers set up simple traps they use electric electrocution to keep the animals from destroying their crops typically then the wives cook them over a fire and sell them by the road to make extra money tastes like chicken I also learned that the mighty Call to Adventure isn't enough to work through some of your deepest fears in New Zealand we were offered the opportunity to skydive from Fox Glacier which is considered one of the top three skydives in the world I opted to hike the glacier instead because I'm pretty afraid of heights even though I almost immediately regretted my decision and was disappointed in myself for being such a weenie I also went to Queenstown which is the literal birthplace of bungee jumping did I learn my lesson from the skydiving regret no I chickened out of jumping too I'm still mad at myself for not being able to conquer my fear for these once in a lifetime chances however when a snake slithered across my foot on a hike in Laos you bet your ass I screamed and I would again some Adventures I could have gone without but Hillary isn't traveling alone dangerous especially as a woman hello try being a woman it's just kind of dangerous so traveling alone can be dangerous sure but there's way to mitigate some of that uncertainty like there is anywhere I generally plan to be back at my hostel by dusk at the latest didn't go hiking alone and didn't walk around town with both earbuds in stuff like that if you're on an adventure sometimes it goes awry and you learn about yourself then too after Cambodia my new travel friends and I headed into Vietnam once again hanging out with some Brits in their 20s meant that every now and then we had a night out perhaps time though because I was older and wiser I did so far less often than I did in New Zealand however after our first night in Ho Chi Minh City I woke up the next morning and discovered that I had managed to lose my phone my wallet and my passport This self-manufactured Disaster created a scenario with some of the best strongest parts of myself came to the Forefront after a quick Panic cry I got to work solving this enormous problem and I had to do it alone because my friends kept going with the tour company as someone notoriously self-sufficient it was really hard for me to rely on the kindness of strangers but I did people offered me enough money to eat or free food or a free scooter ride to the police station to file a report they the owners of the hostel accepted my promise to just pay my bill when I had money again and kept track of my meals and Israeli couple traveling with their three children paid for my new passport pictures in fact the only people who heard my plight and didn't offer to help were two American dudes in their 20s I also had to get creative see you can't get money wired to you without a passport but you can't get a new passport without being able to pay for it well I managed to convince the employee at the embassy that she should just type in my credit card number manually since I had it memorized from all that previous online trip planning it had literally never been done before she had to ask a manager but it worked I had to wheel and deal my way through the government corruption at the Visa processing center if you think the DMV is a problem they mysteriously had no record of me crossing the border from Cambodia and yet 72 hours stressful hours later I was back with my friends trial and tribulation for one trip you might be thinking a couple of weeks later in a story I definitely did not tell my mom until I was back home safely is another example of how the human body in addition to the human spirit is resilient one night at a hostel in Hoi An a very drunk guy was convinced that our room was his room and banged on the door over and over because his key didn't work obviously Rebecca who was on the bottom bunk and therefore closest opened it slightly to calmly explain that he was mistaken he wasn't convinced she tried again it didn't work again Victoria and Sophie both tried to no avail my British friends were being too stereotypically polite I decided that this dude needed a sassy American to set history and so I opened the door and he decided to break it down grab me by the shoulders and throw me headfirst across the hallway after blacking out for a second I woke up to the sounds of my friends hollering for management and I am proud to say that either because I am a feminist and Aries or I was slightly concussed my first instinct was to fight the guy and I started swinging to their credit my polite British friends did not let me is this the exact kind of story that makes parents cue horror movie music in their mind maybe but I was I was proud that I stood up for myself and my friends in such a way even if my left shoulder has never fully recovered and hey a couple of days later when I accidentally got off a motorcycle on the wrong side and burned my leg so badly my skin literally fell off apparently noticed naturally the most important part of traveling and the lessons to be learned is to discover other cultures appreciate them and even admire them whether you're with family friends or as part of a tour group exploring other places eating new food and meeting people who are different from you is a recipe for growth but traveling alone adds a layer the most important thing I learned on these trips and others is how to enjoy my own company how you handle loneliness halfway across the world from anyone you truly know says a lot about you how you handle the stress of minor travel snafu's major travel disasters and yes even being thrown head first into a wall by a random drunk stranger allows for self-reflection of the most important kind who are you when you say goodbye to people that you're never gonna see again when you have a tiny fraction of the world at your disposal for just a moment and no one to cater to you but yourself what will you choose to do with your time if you're not on contract to write a memoir what will you eat spaghetti or bugs will you pray at an ashram or just pray you might someday get out of Vietnam will you fall in love with a man in Bali or fall in love with yourself there's only one way to find out thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,048

Keywords: Adventure, Empowerment, English, Humor, Identity, Life, Self, TEDxTalks, Travel, [TEDxEID:52914]

Id: Ropki1DVo48

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023