The second time I did that route, I was with a friend, and we spent forty minutes in a bus shelter having a low grade argument about whether to wait for a connection that might not come. When I had done the same stretch alone the year before, I had stood in that shelter for maybe six minutes, decided the odds were bad, and started walking. Not because I was braver. Because there was nobody to check with, and checking with somebody turns out to be a whole activity.
Alone, you are a project other people take on
The thing I underestimated is that travelling alone in a place with no visitor infrastructure makes you slightly conspicuous and slightly pitiable, and both work in your favour.
One person standing at a junction with a bag is a problem somebody can solve. Two people are a unit that appears to have its own arrangements. I have been walked to a room, put on the correct vehicle, and handed food by strangers far more often alone than paired, and I do not think that is because the pairs I have been in were less friendly. It is that a pair does not read as needing anything.
This matters more than it sounds, because in these places the local information system is the only information system. If nobody adopts you, you are working from guesses. Alone, I get adopted about every second day. With a companion, it has happened maybe twice in total.
The flip side is that being a project is tiring. You are receiving a lot of goodwill you cannot repay properly, and you are permanently mildly on display.
Two people make decisions faster and worse
I had assumed a second brain would improve my judgement. What actually happens is a thing I now watch for in myself: each of us defers slightly, neither of us fully owns the call, and we end up with a decision nobody would have made alone.
The bus shelter is the clean example. Alone, I would run a quick internal calculation about daylight and distance and start moving. With my friend, we produced twenty minutes of “what do you think,” which is not analysis, it is politeness wearing the costume of analysis. Then we waited, then the connection did not come, then we walked the same road in worse light.
The other pattern is risk drift. Alone, I am reasonably honest with myself about being tired or cold or out of my depth. With somebody, there is a small pressure not to be the one who says it first, and if we are both doing that, we get further out than either of us intended. I have been on exactly one walk where both of us admitted afterward that we had wanted to turn back an hour earlier and neither had said so.
We now do a stupid, effective thing: one person is nominated for the day. Not a leader, just whoever owns the calls. It removes the deferring loop entirely and it takes two seconds to assign at breakfast.
What a companion is genuinely better at
I do not want this to read as an argument for going alone, because there are things a second person makes plainly better.
Anything that requires waiting is transformed. Six hours at a transport stop alone is six hours of endurance. With somebody, it is a long conversation. A significant fraction of this kind of travel is dead time, and dead time is where solo trips actually get hard, far more than any dramatic moment.
Practical redundancy is real too. One person holds the bags while the other asks around. One stays with the luggage while the other finds the room. If one of you gets ill, and I have been the ill one, having somebody who can go and get food and explain your absence is worth a great deal.
And there is the memory thing. I have been somewhere alone that I now half doubt, because nothing corroborates it except my own account. With a companion there is a shared record, which sounds sentimental but is also the difference between an experience and a story you can still access years later.
Turning back is harder with two
The hardest conversation in this kind of travel is the one where somebody says we should stop. Alone, it is not a conversation, it is a decision, and I can make it without losing face to anybody except myself.
With a companion, it becomes a small negotiation with feelings attached. You are potentially spending the other person’s trip. If they have flown a long way to do this specific thing, saying “I want to turn around” carries a cost that is not really about the road.
The only thing that has worked for us is agreeing the rule before we set out, when nobody is invested. A time, not a place: at three o’clock we turn around, wherever we are. Because the time is agreed in the abstract, honouring it at three is not one person overruling the other, it is both of us following something we already decided. It sounds bureaucratic. It has saved us two arguments and one genuinely bad evening.
What alone costs, which I do not always admit
I write about solo travel more warmly than I actually experience all of it, and I want to be straight about the gap.
Alone, I get lonely on a fairly predictable cycle, usually around day four or five, and it does not feel like the interesting kind of solitude. It feels like a flatness where things stop registering. It passes, and it comes back.
Alone, I also eat worse, because eating alone in a place where I cannot ask questions is more effort than crackers. And alone, being a woman in a place where a woman travelling by herself is unusual means a steady background of attention: not hostile, mostly curiosity, but constant, and I have to spend energy on it every day. That is my particular experience and I am not going to generalise it into advice for anyone else. It is simply part of what the trip costs me.
How I actually choose now
My rough rule is that I go alone when the point is the place, and with somebody when the point is the going.
If I want to actually get inside somewhere, be spoken to, be handed things, understand a bit of how a settlement works, I go by myself and accept that some evenings will be dull and some days will be tiring in a way that has nothing to do with walking.
If the appeal is the route itself, or the transport is going to be long and stupid, or I mostly want the company, I bring somebody and accept that we will see the place through a slightly thicker pane of glass. Both are fine. What does not work is going with somebody and then being annoyed that the place stayed at arm’s length, which is what I did the second time, and it was not my friend’s fault at all.