An Experiment in Single Travel

Bus bay 6 was empty. You've got to be kidding me. My plane had landed an hour earlier, at 5:35am, and I had scheduled a pick up--had they left without me? Sleep deprived from my 14 hours of travel, I couldn't bring myself to ask someone when I didn't even know the name of the shuttle--why hadn't I written that down??--so I ponied up and paid to use the Wifi in the lobby, only to discover that, yep, I'd put the the time down right, and nope, this shuttle bus--unimaginatively named Cairns Airport Shuttle--had no one in the lobby or the bus bay. Time to make the call.

But as I awaited my driver, having been assured over the phone that he would be there in 10 minutes (oddly enough, the same amount of time it takes to get to the airport from the heart of Cairns...), I felt my frustrations slipping away as I looked around and realized: I was in Australia. It was dawn, and as I stood waiting I heard a chorus of songbirds, all calling to each other in trills and tralls I'd never heard before; one, landing in the deserted bay beside me, began a complicated dance, its white-tipped tail swinging from side to side as if unhinged from its black body as it hopped about the concrete, eying me with benign curiosity. The sky was turning orange, turning my bird friends to idealized silhouettes, as the bus finally pulled up and I set off to my hostel.

A bit of a rough start to my first-ever solo vacation, maybe, but the morning proved beautiful, though strange. I couldn't check in right away--it was 7am, after all--so I set off toward the Cairns waterfront, where the sun had just risen to reveal a beautiful bay, flanked by a "Caution: salt-water crocodiles" sign and a surprisingly well-used (for 7am) wooden promenade, where I alternately strolled and sat, just soaking up the view. After 14 hours in transit, it was a lot to handle.

So, somewhat surprisingly, were the people. Having lived in Taiwan for the past 11 months, I had laughingly referred to my resultant uneasiness in large groups of "foreigners," but I didn't really anticipate it actually having a serious impact on me once I was back in a Western country. But it did.

The best way I can describe it is that I felt as I imagine autistic people feel when viewing the world: completely overstimulated to the point that I was slightly freaked out even to talk to the people around me. The very thing I'd most mourned being able to do in my time abroad, share a (potentially meaningless) little conversation with someone, now seemed impossibly difficult.

And then there were the accents. I've always been a lover of foreign accents, be they British, Australian, Kiwi, South African--I'm not picky; as long as it doesn't sound like mine, every accent is fantastic. I've never had much trouble understanding them, either--seemed pretty straightforward. But now, dumped in Australia, I felt myself straining to understand the people I spoke with--we were speaking the same language, I knew, but then why was it taking my brain so long to process? Another instance of my Taiwanese experience conspiring against me: I'd become an expert in understanding "Taiwanese English," but at the apparent cost of understanding every other native English dialect beside my own.

At the end of the promenade, I ate alone at a little cafe from which I could just catch a glimpse of the ocean, sitting with my Kindle version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (yes, that is my holiday reading of choice at the moment) as I munched on an overpriced ham-and-cheese croissant and pondered how it would be, a week of meals alone with my inner monologue and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Pictured: A WESTERN MEAL! Not pictured (behind the sun flare): the ocean

As it turned out, not all that solitary. By 10:30, I was checked into my room, a gorgeous girls-only dorm with eight beds built into the walls so that there was a dividing wall between two sets of four; mine lay in the back bottom corner, and was a cozy cave double. Absolutely fantastic. So, too, were my roommates. Over the course of the day, I met them all: Kim, a Brit who was living and working in Cairns; Melanie, a Dutch girl finishing her Masters in Adelaide; Heidi, a Swiss girl (yes, really) who had just finished a study abroad; Johanna, a German girl living in Australia; Kat and Laura, two Brits from Liverpool here on holiday; and Katherine, a fellow American who had recently moved to Australia from, of all places, Portland, Oregon.

For all of its solo ventures (meals, grocery shopping, finalizing my dive school registration), my first day was a day with a surprisingly large amount of companionship.

And that, once I got past my reverse culture shock and airplane exhaustion, has been the best story of my so-called solo journey: surprising and wonderful companionship with strangers. The girls in my dorm, the people in my dive class (Michael, a Belgian; Ellen, a Swede; Jeroen, a Dutchman; two Germans, Natalie and Lars; Anja, a German Kiwi; and Amber, an Aussie (13 years old!))--we all got to just chat, even about inconsequential things, and it's been lovely. So far, at least, my experiment in single travel has not been altogether single--and that suits me just fine.