Tips For Your Solo Backpacking Journey

These days more people are interested in finding themselves by solo backpacking, and the reasons are to travel while challenging themselves with new places, different people and experiences. It indicates that these people really like freedom. Solo travel doesn’t equal loneliness – but more like living and enjoying your journey without relying on the company of others. The question is – how do you know that travelling solo will go smoothly? Let’s see some tips for a real solo backpacking journey to help you plan out everything to succeed in your trip!

Knowing Yourself
Solo travel can be your once in a lifetime experience. Before travelling, you should take some time to get to know yourself better. Have a talk with yourself before deciding where you want to go and what you’d love to experience. If you can give yourself an answer whenever encountered with problems, then you are brave enough to do difficult things. Even if you sometimes feel lonely by yourself and things don’t work out as planned, remember to believe in yourself, and be yourself. It’s your solo journey, and it will be awesome!

Plan Where to Go
Having a travel plan is super important; it’s better to decide on a travel destination before you go and find out everything you need to know in advance, than doing everything last minute. If you don’t know much about the place, reading travel blogs that contain travel information about how to go, things to do, places to stay, safety tips, and ideas for trips can help you a lot. Alternatively, you can do some research, print off a map of the area and mark where the main sights are, write the internal bus numbers, stops, and times on the back. This sure can help you in times where you get lost, or probably where the internet doesn’t work.

Save Money and Plan Expenses
Financial planning is essential; you have to know how long your journey will take and what kind of travel experience you’ll be on. The length of your trip is a huge factor in determining how much you need. Just write your numbers on paper and you will be able to calculate your expense e.g. how much do you spend on the ticket flight, train, buses and how much money roughly you’ll spend per day for staying in hostels, hotels, restaurants, and attractions or activity you do in those places.

Choose a Suitable Hotel
Safety is unarguably one of the most important factors of choosing an accommodation. Choosing a safe and comfortable accommodation will help to ease anxiety and sleeping problems e.g. close to town, attractions or close to the airport, train, buses station. If you want to be 100% (or close) confident about it, do some research and read reviews about the safety measures of the hotel and its surrounding environments.

Pack Your Backpack
The most important lesson in packaging is to pack things according to the length of your trip. Check the weather forecast of your destination before you leave. To make sure you have everything, just make a note on your list. One thing not to overlook is to save space: roll your clothes up rather than folding, think twice before you pack something heavy, and don’t overpack. Keep things in order: heavy stuff at the bottom of the backpack. Also, bring along your personal care, e.g. skincare, necessary cleansers, toners, and don’t forget medications as you never know what might happen. Best to have them just in case!

Meet People and Make Friends
There are countless opportunities to meet other people and make friends during your journey in hostels, on tours, on buses, or even on airplanes. The best way to make friends is to be approachable, smile, who knows where that simple “hello”can lead to. If you choose to stay in hostels, it’s more likely that you’ll meet people where you’ll participate in activities like joining a group tour, eating meals together, joining the hostel’s events together. Sometimes a lot of tourists travel to visit the community or local places, and meet fellow travellers who come from different countries, speak different languages. These are ways to meet people and make friends during your solo travel!

Take Awesome Pictures
People adore beauty and want to capture travel memories in the camera. Everyone now carries either a camera or smartphone while travelling and looking to share awesome pictures on their social media. If you’re travelling alone, don’t hesitate to just ask someone to take a picture of your solo travel shots. Otherwise, you can also take pretty pictures of yourself with some skills such as using reflections or set the 10 seconds timer, for example. It might be a bit more difficult to photograph yourself, but travel memories are such a sweet thing it makes you reminisce about that time of the beautiful journey.

Have Enough Power Spare
Most people use power banks when travelling, ensuring they have portable power to charge battery powered items like mobile phones and other similar items. It’s not ideal if your phone’s battery dies at the most inopportune moment. Bringing enough power spare also means a peace of mind and never having to worry about your device dying ever again. That’s why power banks are lifesavers whenever we travel. Undoubtedly, it’s a must-have on your packing list.

Try Something You’ve Never Done Before
Speaking of lifetime experience, we encourage everyone who’s reading this to do or eat something you have never tried before, with the challenges of actually being in a non-home country. Don’t just look at other people trying that new game, eat that seems-yummy dish, or join that interesting day tour, do yourself a favor and explore them too!

We hope these tips inspire you to get down and plan your solo journey soon!