More News From Alicia: A Young Solo Traveler’s Adventures Far From Home

Two months ago, when I devoted this column to Alicia Dunams, a 22-year-old Angeleno embarking on a yearlong solo trip around the world, I had no idea that her story would strike such a chord. I only knew that I wished I could travel in her shoes, which is why I persuaded Alicia to e-mail me along the way. That first installment, following Alicia through the Cook Islands, Fiji and New Zealand, brought a flurry of letters from readers who recalled their own adventures on life-transforming journeys.

Since then, Alicia has gone sky-diving and bungee-jumping in New Zealand, scuba diving and snorkeling on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and trekking in Thailand’s hill country. She fell in love with a young Englishman named Jason she met in the Cook Islands, was forced to dig deep into her travel kitty for a new plane ticket from Australia to Thailand when an Asian airline stopped flying that route, and came down with a digestive ailment she calls “Katmandu comeback”--in Nepal, of course. That’s where I caught up with her, healthy again and just as plucky as when she left L.A. in August. Here’s what she wrote:

Alicia Dunams: I’ve been in Nepal for almost three weeks, and just completed a nine-day trek in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas. I can’t describe the beauty of the scenery from the Annapurna Sanctuary, which gives you a 360-degree view of the surrounding mountains. To save money on my trek, I decided to do it without a porter, guide or tour group--just me and a 30-pound pack. Guidebooks don’t recommend this, but I always made sure I was in sight of other backpackers. The Nepalese who live in the region think it strange to see women alone. They call us “empty women” and try to find male trekking partners or porters to help us along. I found another woman on her own and we began trekking together. We became good friends and spent my 23rd birthday together. Do two “empty women” trekking together make a whole?

More than a whole, I should think. I’m glad Alicia found someone to join in her birthday celebration. Over the last five years, I’ve spent most of my birthdays on the road, raising a glass of wine aboard an Alaska State Ferry, riding a train across Idaho and hiking up Long’s Peak in Colorado to mark my 40th. In every case, the scenery and the place seemed the best birthday present I could wish for--and all the better because, in a way, I’d given it to myself.

A.D.: For me, traveling alone has made me feel as if I’m not my parents’ daughter, my brother’s sister, my girlfriends’ friend or my boss’s employee. I’m just me. Sometimes we only discover who we are in isolation, away from people who know us and environments we are familiar with, free from routines that deflect us from focusing on ourselves. What attracted me about traveling is that each day, each person and situation that presents itself can change your life forever. Nothing is drawing me back to the life I led before I left. My home is where I am.

Travelers do carry their homes on their backs. But for me, as I get older, the ties of family and home only grow stronger. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night in Beijing or Oaxaca worrying about the people I left behind, hoping that nothing bad happens while I’m away. I’ve called them from some of the strangest places, needing to hear their voices but finding only banalities to say. Alicia reports the same thing.

A.D.: Sometimes I have a hard time communicating with friends and family about my experiences, because they can’t be encapsulated in cheesy one-liners like “Katmandu’s great” or “Thailand’s beaches are beautiful.” My mom always ends our weekly phone conversations this way: “Always remember that you are my life. Take care of yourself. I love you.”

In a sense, you owe it to the people who love you to take care of yourself when you’re away. Alicia’s doing that, it seems to me, but without forfeiting her need to push the envelope a bit.

A.D.: So many people I’ve encountered have called me brave for traveling on my own. I don’t think I’m brave. I think I’m cautious, even fearful. For a women traveling alone fear is a gift, a God-given instinct you’ve got to pay attention to. Since I had a little set-to with a taxi driver on a deserted road in Fiji, I haven’t had any problems. But on a bus in Nepal I found a man’s hand in my day pack. I just zipped it up and ignored the incident.

On a crowded bus in northern India, I found a man’s hand in my lap. There were no other women on board, so I didn’t think it productive to cry out. I just pushed him away, and there we sat for the next 50 miles, without saying a word. You’ve got to pick your battles, I’ve found.

A.D.: I’ve been away for almost five months, seen eight countries and learned at least one thing about traveling: Itineraries are made to be broken; the best plan is to have no plan at all. The weekend before I left, my brother and sister-in-law told me they were having a baby, so I decided to travel for nine months instead of a year. Then, when Philippine Airlines stopped flying out of Australia and I had to buy a new ticket to Thailand, I didn’t have the money I was going to use to go to Indonesia. Jason has been another factor. Maybe it’s the rare travel romance that lasts, but we can’t bear to wait five months to see each other again. So I decided to go to London instead of Germany before the European leg of my trip.

The unexpected, the imperfect, the unplanned are the things that make up my life. The cow sitting in the road for four hours stopping traffic, the rat that scampers across your head at 2 a.m., taxi drivers who won’t take you where you want to go, delayed planes, buses, trains--these are all a part of traveling. I’ve done a lot of living in the last five months. But most important is that I’ve done it alone and know I can do anything I put my mind to. Take care. I’m off to India tomorrow for two weeks.