Traveling Women Face Daily Dilemma: Is It Safe to Take Back the Night?

Let’s say you are on your own in Rome, staying at the Hotel Sant’Anselmo on the Aventine hill, slightly removed from major tourist attractions but charming, quiet and well managed. After a day spent seeing the sights, you go back to the hotel, rest and get ready for dinner. You consider calling a cab to take you to the Piazza Navona or Campo de’ Fiori, neighborhoods where restaurants abound. On the other hand, it’s a nice night and you like to walk.

But is it safe?

Every woman traveler who finds herself alone in a strange city after dark must ask this question. Some, like Carol Gallagher, an executive with American Management Systems in Walnut Creek, say they rarely go out at night when they’re away from home on business, unless it’s with colleagues who live in the area and know it well. Besides, Gallagher says, she’s usually too busy keeping up with what’s going on back at the office to go out at night. That’s understandable. Even though I’m primarily a pleasure traveler, I put in long days seeing the sights and am usually too tired for a night on the town.

Still, I hate to think of women travelers eating room-service dinners and watching TV in the world’s great cities just because it’s dark outside. “Women should be able to go out at night in foreign cities. Why else did they go there in the first place?” says my mother, who, in all questions of travel, is my oracle.

However, I’m sure she would not like to know that I’ve pushed the envelope occasionally. While staying at the YMCA Tourist Hotel in central New Delhi, I couldn’t face dinner at the awful restaurant on the premises, especially knowing that there were better choices a 10-minute walk away. I could have taken a cab or an auto-rickshaw to the tandoori buffet at the Imperial Hotel on Janpath, but it seemed too close for that. In my daytime wanderings, I’d gotten to know the neighborhood, so I set out in the dark, alone on foot. There were no street lights or sidewalks, and by night a park along the way had been transformed into an encampment of pavement dwellers, where a pack of ragged little boys chased me. When I yelled at them, they fell away. But I never walked that street in the dark again.

I’ve been followed by men at night in Istanbul and chided by a British tourist for eating a late dinner alone in a cafe in Arles, France. I’ve never had any problems going out at night in Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Venice, Rome, Beijing or Buenos Aires, where it seems everybody’s up and roaming until way past midnight.

But the last time I was in Buenos Aires was more than five years ago, and things change. Since then, economic stagnation and unemployment have made the Argentine capital far less safe, with restaurant and taxicab robberies not uncommon, according to Kent Brown, managing director of Pinkerton Global Intelligence, a Virginia-based company that monitors dangers to travelers around the world. Consequently, it’s crucial to check on safety in cities you plan to visit by contacting the State Department, which provides information by telephone at (202) 647-5225, by fax at (202) 647-3000 and on the Internet at https://www.state.gov. It’s also a good idea to read guidebooks and talk to people who have recently been there. Women travelers should try to talk to other women, who understand female safety concerns.

My strategies for making evening forays on the road are obvious: Never walk down a deserted street, avoid making eye contact with strangers and showing the contents of your wallet at cash registers, try to act like a local and, if you don’t like the look of someone nearby, cross the street, turn the corner or pop into a store. Here are some other tips from experts:

* Pinkerton director Brown says you should walk at night only in places that are well lighted, with plenty of people around.

* Leave jewelry at home, advises Jerry Trent, a 26-year veteran of the L.A. Police Department and senior consultant with the Officers Group, a Beverly Hills-based security company. Trent says women need to walk strongly and confidently, avoiding the victim posture, which he describes as “Bambi caught in the headlights.” And they should rely on the concierge at their hotel to tell them where it’s safe to go at night, or they should ask a police officer. Trent did this himself on a recent trip to New York, and the officer rewarded him with detailed instructions on where and when to walk.

* Sheila Swan, coauthor of “Safety and Security for Women Who Travel” (Travelers’ Tales Guides, 1998), reminds travelers never to take a gypsy cab and to try to look as if they know precisely where they’re going. This entails studying your map before you strike out at night, talking to the hotel concierge or asking a woman hotel employee whether she’d walk the route you’re thinking of taking alone at night.

* “Think before you go,” says Marybeth Bond, author of many books on women’s travel, including “Gutsy Women: Travel Tips and Wisdom for the Road” (Travelers’ Tales Guides, 1996). To her that means choosing a hotel near a city’s center, where there are lots of shops and restaurants--for instance, in Paris, near St.-Germain-des-Pres, not the Gare du Nord.

* Evelyn Hannon, editor of the online women’s travel magazine Journeywoman.com, thinks small hotels are best for women travelers. She realized this in Bath, England, where she told the manager of her little hotel that she wanted a quick dinner and wondered whether it was safe to walk to the local pub alone. When he said yes, she went there and found the place so pleasant that time flew by. At 10 p.m. the hotel manager turned up because he wanted to make sure she was all right.

Walk carefully when the sun goes down. But remember what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “Something might burst in your inside any day of the week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked into your room with three turns of the key.”