A Walking Tour Is an Easy First Step for Women Who Fear Solo Travel

On a train bound for Shanghai two years ago, with my feet propped on my backpack and a cup of green tea warming my hands, I got to talking with a young Chinese woman who was taking a group of Americans on a 21-day tour across China. “You must be brave to travel on your own,” she said. “It’s hard for a woman.”

Briefly, I considered telling her that next to truly intrepid female travelers such as Sarah Hobson, who wandered through Iran dressed as a man, or Rosie Swale, who had a baby on a 30-foot-long catamaran while circumnavigating the globe, I’m a mouse, scared of everything from garter snakes to dirty bedsheets.

Instead, I let the compliment stand, deciding that bravery is relative, and that, in fact, I’d come a long way since I started traveling--usually alone, and unavoidably as a woman.

Fear isn’t unique to women travelers, of course. Anyone can get robbed, sick, disastrously off-schedule, lonely, road-weary or lost. But because women are more vulnerable than men, the common travel anxieties cut more sharply, and are exacerbated by the dread of sexual molestation.

Sometimes I wonder how it would feel to strike off with a man’s physical confidence, which seems to me a lot more useful than the little mace gun my father gave me before my first solo trip abroad. I have bright, enterprising female friends who handle million-dollar advertising accounts and publish blockbuster novels, but wouldn’t have the nerve to go to Marrakech alone.

They meant to go to Marrakech (or Tuscany, or Turkey, or Nome) with their husbands. But for all the reasons why a woman’s life isn’t what it was 50 years ago, they can’t count on the cushion of a male travel companion. So they go to spas, dude ranches and Club Meds. Or they stay home.

When I got a divorce eight years ago, my mother, who’s been married to my father for 51 years, told me to go to Europe. So I took a trip that, as luck would have it, included a day of walking a section of Italy’s western coast called the Cinque Terre. There, a handful of isolated villages connected by a network of winding paths perch on rocky cliffs high above the Riviera di Levante.

I booked a room with Baroque crown moldings and a sagging bed at a hotel in the town of Levanto, took a train south to Riomaggiore, then walked back up the coast, stopping for lunch at a table under an umbrella in Corniglio: green salad, linguine with garlic, oil and snails, and a carafe of the local white wine, Chiaretto del Faro, half of which I funneled into my canteen. Late that afternoon, when I met a barricade on the precarious path, I ducked under it and carried on all the way to Levanto instead of turning back. Sometimes it’s worth taking little risks. At any rate, by the time I reached Rome three days later, I was ready for the hurly-burly.

This is how I learned that a walking tour in a reasonably safe and scenically blessed place is an excellent way for women with a modicum of courage to travel, an easy first step in a journey of discovery that can take you across China or the world.

“If you are ready to leave . . . wife and child and friends, and never see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, ‘No matter how bucolic a place seems, you can’t let your guard down entirely.’

and are a free man--then you are ready for a walk,” wrote Henry David Thoreau.

But for a free woman, a walking vacation can be a less daunting enterprise altogether, requiring no special gear besides a backpack, raincoat and boots. If you follow well-established routes (such as the Grandes Randonnees of France, or the ancient Ridgeway Path in central England), you can feel reasonably safe and don’t need camping equipment because inviting country inns provide clean sheets and sustenance along the way.

Two autumns ago in the English Lake District, I did take a sleeping bag, though, so I could stay in camping barns attached to farmhouses, with baaing sheep to lull me to sleep and big country breakfasts to fuel the day’s march. My load seemed heavy sometimes, but on a spiritual level I felt distinctly unencumbered.

You could book a group walking tour, of course, from such companies as Backroads, Country Walkers and Mountain Travel-Sobek. Some firms (in Ireland especially) will arrange walking trips for you to take on your own, with vans to carry the luggage and accommodations pre-booked. But the cost of these often seems high. Walking should be cheap. If the price for a tour you’re considering is over $100 a day, try planning it yourself--which is all part of the adventure.

I’m not out to conquer Everest, so I do short, easy trips, seldom lasting more than four days or covering more than 10 miles between sunrise and sunset. Choosing the right path is key. To do so, I go through lots of guidebooks, finally settling on a region with an old-fashioned, country air at some distance from major metropolitan areas. Then I order a map, such as the wondrously detailed Ordnance Survey maps of England that pinpoint every sheepfold, prehistoric menhir and loo you’re likely to pass.

Maps like these, and the walks they direct, turn faraway places into intimately knowable neighborhoods. You feel the world underfoot, rediscover small pleasures (such as the Cadbury hazelnut chocolate bars I felt perfectly justified in munching among the English lakes) and allow your mind to wander.

Granted, I’ve made mistakes and gotten into a few scrapes while walking. Like the time I was chased by a pack of wild dogs while following a jungly path on the French Polynesian island of Huahine, which is why I now carry a stick. No matter how bucolic a place seems, you can’t let your guard down entirely.

My current walking wish list includes a stroll on the Croton Aqueduct Trail, which follows the Hudson River from the Croton Dam to the 242nd Street stop of the IRT subway in the Bronx; the pilgrim’s path over the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain; England’s Coast to Coast walk from St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay; and maybe, when I toughen up, the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail from Skagway to Bennett Lake in Alaska. With options like these, I don’t see the point in Everest, or mace.

A brochure on Italy’s Cinque Terre is available from the Italian Government Tourist Board in Chicago, telephone (312) 644-9448. Ordnance Survey maps are published by The Ordnance Survey, Romsey Road, Maybush, Southampton, England SO9 4DH, and from the California Map and Travel Center in Santa Monica, tel. (310) 396-6277. Organized tours: Backroads, tel. (800) 462-2848 or (510) 527-1555; Country Walkers, tel. (800) 464-9255; and Mountain Travel-Sobek, tel. (888) 687-6235. For information on self-guided trips in Ireland, consult the booklet “Walking and Cycling Ireland,” available from the Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., New York, NY 10154; tel. (800) 223-6470 or (212) 418-0800.

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This new column about women’s travel will appear weekly. Spano, who joined the Travel staff recently, is a seasoned traveler who has freelanced widely. She will also write destination stories for Travel.