It’s fun to think about how much the trips, especially solo trips have changed in less than a century.
Trips in the end are no more than trends, are something we do, following or someone else experience, or some idea we have found in our life.
Everything in life that is a trend is a sort of wave, these waves are one after the other one, always different but with common elements, their parts:
- In the beginning, you have the innovators, people who have the new ideas, people who don’t really follow the majority and they take the risks, they experiment and they enjoy doing different things.
- Higher, pointing the crest, you have the “baby followers” the ones that take a lower risk because they can evaluate what the innovators have lived and find solutions to their problems or alternatives.
- On the crest but also in the descendent part, after the first followers, there are the “older followers” the ones that live these “innovations” as part of their culture without really thinking about the reality without them.
- The last part of the wave is made by the “discoverer”, those people who find, after a not defined time, those trends again; these people are also really close to the new innovators – I’m thinking about my dad who recently came out, super happy and surprised to have discovered as something trendy the white sneakers, the coolest things to wear in 2021!!! / I was kind of surprised he never realized about their existence but probably because he was not interested in seeing them.. probably several friends started to own a pair of white sneakers, talking about them and the topic arrived at his eyes..!.
Now that we have explained the relationship between the trend and the trips, let’s talk about the solo trips, their story.
The story of trips as, fun time spent somewhere else is almost recent; people in the past used to stay in the same places, their idea of relaxation was at home, the idea of fun was connected to public places in your city/town/village, at friends houses or in those buildings where people used to share lifelike, religious buildings or areas, sports centers or art locations.
People used to live their places or used to move to somewhere where to build their houses and live there.
Rarely people used to have trips as amusement trips, even between the wealthier people it is was not a use.. being under the sun was considered in several countries something almost bad, the coasts were for weak people (for those ones who were sick/with illnesses) and the wild places for explorers who wanted to discover something new and exotic.
When Did The Trips Start & How?
It’s hard to generalize for the whole planet, everyone lives differently but I can show what has been done in the western countries and in part followed by others.
Here in Italy for example, before the 1950s people used to not go to the seaside if not for medical issues, there were no hotels or resting places close to the costs because it was dangerous.
People if they had the possibility, used to go for big life events like marriage to the main big cities and this was almost the best of the trip reality!
During the ’60s and the ’70s people started to own a more wealthy lifestyle, televisions were more or less all over and people had the possibility to watch, in movies, tv shows or just on the news where the richest people, the “V.I.P.”, the “stars” use to go to celebrate, to isolate themselves or to party with other friends – it is inevitable to say that most of these “vouyers” started to dream and desire to do the same, to spend time in those places or to imitate that lifestyle that they used to watch inside little screens.
Time passed and new trends came out!
Lower flights, cheaper resting places, faster travels, the creation of experience packages, and last-minute tickets allowed people to feel they had the planet in their hands!
The twenty years between the end and the beginning of the millennium was something “shocking” from the traveling point of view: the tourism exploded so fast, so strong that the planet was not able to absorb the impact.
If we collocate this part on the wave graphic, the years around 2007/2013, are the orange ones where even people who never slept outside their homes knew about for example Air BnB or the Skyscanner website, or they could have spent at least one day in their life relaxing in a place that was “far” from their house.
As we indicated before when we arrive at the end of a trend a new one is born at the same time; when something is so popular a minority of people want to have something new.
Because in life everything is connected we have to make few maths calculations and think about people who, around 2015 had possibilities to do something new compared to the more popular trip trends: people between the 25 to 45-year-old – people who were working, younger souls full of energy, maybe without a family or children (thinking about those years it’s easier to think about young children) so with fewer worries, people more independent and in the case supported by the parents/families. These generations of people are also the children of the parents who lived and absorbed several new-age values, ideas, or even beliefs!
Well , a part of this “group” started to crave something new, something less commercial, something more unique.. but what can you do so unique that is not sharable with a lot of people?
As you can imagine the answer is only one: solo trips.
It is not important where you go as long as you feel something, as long as you understand something intimate about you, about your soul, about yourself.
We can literally say that solo trips were born as the most luxurious form of the trip and for the first time started to be made for fun and not for specific reasons: I’m thinking about someone, who could need rehab in a center and move for few months on a small island in the pacific to detox from anything; this is also a solo trip but the proposal is totally different.
Solo trips started to become important for that generation because they have been – considering the world pandemic we are living – an important step in people’s minds, a sort of stopping and breathing moment where people started to get conscious of themselves but also about what they had around.
It seems crazy to think that people are not able to see what they have around and only thanks to these trips they do.. but in a lot of cases, this is a fact.
Globalization has pushed this planet to spin so fast that what is not important directly in our lives, even if it is in front of us, pass on a second, third, fourth floor and we stop to see it, to think about it, till the moment when it becomes grey, anonymous, almost invisible to our eyes.
So people got shocked to restart to see, and spreading their experiences made other people curious to explore and see what they would have felt.
Ok, we have underscored the reason but where do people go on solo trips?
Where Do People Go On Solo Trips?
There is not a real place, you could be in your room in front of a screen and get conscious, you could be in front of a book or just watch the sky or the wall of a room.
It is not important where you go, what is important, is how you go there, what you bring with you to live and experience but if you are not able to find, anything around you and you want to go somewhere else, here are a few ideas!!!
FARM LIFE
There are a lot of possibilities for this option.
If you are someone who needs to have your hands dirty, to work with nature, to have a lifestyle that follows the sun this is the perfect experience for you.
All over the world, you can find different kinds of farms specialized in anything from plants to animals. Those farms offer/give you a job, you can plan in advance for how long to be there.
It’s true, you can meet people there but most of these jobs are solo jobs, maybe you have to pick vegetables or patrol cars.
These kinds of solo trips experiences give you the possibility to travel the world, sometimes you receive a visa and also a salary but more than everything you have the possibility to reconnect with your self doing an open-air activity, having time to reflect and analyze.
YOGA RETREATS
If you are looking for solo trips that have a mix of a workout, self-discipline, and meditations, these centers are always really good!
You can book them for a weekend for few weeks and they give you the possibility to relax, work out, detox by eating and drinking specific foods, give you self-discipline following the strict rules but also contemplate and meditate.
In several of these centers, it is mostly forbidden to talk, in this way they create a stronger interaction between people and the background, where you can feel the spaces, the lights – most of them are in the middle of nature so for people that spend a lot of time inside cities, having a silent place full of natural sounds can make you feel a stronger connection with your inner/natural side
WALKS/TRAILS
If you are someone who just wants to be free, living your journey there are three places that are really famous:
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA TRAILS
Spanish trails created back in the past by the monks coming from different areas of Europe.
The walkers that take the name of “pilgrims” cross the whole Spain – its a journey of more or less a month, along the trails there are places where you can rest or contemplate.
The general idea is leaving your commodities to walk, walk towards something new and along the journey, step by step depurate your essence, your soul.
Once you arrive in Santiago, you visit the main cathedral as a sign of respect to everyone else who did it and the “ritual” “impose” you to go to the ocean after, burn your clothes and swim inside the ocean to restart a new life journey.
For sure, it’s a trail that was religious and for this reason, it still has a lot of religiosity inside of it but this element doesn’t exclude people who are not religious to do it, because, in the end, it’s just a journey along a trail with yourself or with who you are – no one suggests to do it in a group of people for the reason that it’s important to think, meditate concentrate.
INDIA/TIBET TRAIL
These solo trips are are the “sporty” ones!
Probably the more intense because you have to fight not just with normal fatigue, with mental stress but also with the difficulties of the mountains.
These trails are made for a lot of reasons but one of the most common ones is to fight against nature in itself, in a way arriving at the peaks you win, you win the hardest journey, and arriving at the top you kind of prove your stubbornness to not give up in front of anything.
Few years ago a French director made a move about that, a young guy to prove his love to this girl told her to go and climb this high mountain – she proposed him that if he would have claimed this mountain they would have started to hang out together.
He did it, the director made a movie, and you can watch this real story.
ANDE TRAILS
If the first one we talked about was more “spiritual”, the second one more “physical” the third one is going to touch another part, the mental one.
There is this huge mountain range that covers most of South America: Ande.
This journey compared to the other ones is less hard for your body, is less hard for your soul but for sure it is the longer one, it is the one that more than everything makes you face yourself.
Some people do it in a car, others in a bike or in a motorcycle, other ones dare to do it walking.
No one really knows what you can find along the road because there are “no roads” but somehow, if you start someone will show you away, as it has always been and when you arrive at the end you will be completely different.
There will be someday where you will not know where you would have gone but if you would have seen yourself from a wider angle you would have seen really much more than a single person. This is the only way to see the Nazca lines.
