“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.”
-Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Imagine, just for a second, that you’re me.
Imagine that you’re a solo female traveler in your late 20s, making your way through the Balkans for the very first time. (C’mon guys, just for a second. You can do it.)
Imagine that you’re in Novi Sad, Serbia contemplating your next move. You’d intended for Budapest, Hungary to be your next destination, but it’s proving difficult to find affordable accommodation (damn you, summer festivals!), so you hesitate.
Now imagine that one morning, a few days before your departure, you wake up to an email from a stranger. Said stranger has stumbled upon your blog while researching a trip to South America. Stranger sees that you’re in Serbia. Stranger asks if you’d like a contact who also happens to live in Serbia. He’d be more than happy to show you around the town he lives in, stranger says. It’s not far from Novi Sad.
There’s nothing particularly offensive about this email; in fact, it’s quite nice–complimentary, well-written. On the surface, everything about it is benign.
But since you’re me, you ignore it. You reason that you’re being sensible and chalk it up to your instinct to protect yourself as a solo woman in a foreign country.
You plan to reply later that day so as not to seem rude and to leave it at that.
A few hours pass. You go out for a bite to eat and come back to your hostel ready to sort out your travel plans.
But first, you find another email. This time, it’s from the guy living in Serbia, the one living in a town a few hours away who’d be happy to show you around.
He reinforces the message the first email carried–that he’d be delighted for you to visit his adopted hometown, a place not many foreigners tend to visit. He gives a fair amount of personal details, including that he’s an American with Serbian heritage and he’s in the country studying the language, writing a book, and reconnecting with family.
This second email is somehow even more lovely and complimentary than the first. It’s eloquent, it’s charming, it’s kind.
You find yourself completely disarmed by the fact that you don’t find this email threatening in the slightest.
You have yet to book your travel to Budapest, so a side trip to this nearby town, Vršac, is still perfectly feasible.
The question for you now is, (since you’re still me in this situation):
Do you go?
Standing at the bus terminal in Novi Sad a few days later, a crack of thunder ripped through the sky. The clouds spilled open as suddenly as they’d appeared, unleashing a torrential downpour unlike any I’d seen yet that summer.
My bus arrived not long after, the word Vršac emblazoned on the side.
The crackling thunder and blinding lightning continued, nearly driving me out of my skin with every blow. Warily, I boarded the bus set to arrive at my destination around 8 pm, a time when little daylight would remain.
I hope this isn’t a mistake, I thought.
And although my mind had a way of keeping the worst case scenario at the forefront of my thoughts, my gut was surprisingly at ease.
Where there might have been fear under different circumstances, there was only trust; where there otherwise might have been trepidation, there was only faith–blind though it may have been.
Four days later as I bid farewell to my magnanimous host and boarded my train bound for Budapest, I couldn’t help but smile.
Not only had my instinct been correct, but I’d been rewarded generously in the form of liberal hospitality, memorable experiences, and most importantly, a new friendship.
Throughout my four days in Vršac my host, Mark, proved himself to be good-natured and generous, talented and driven.
My first night in town, he took me to the best traditional Serbian restaurant. In the days that followed, we visited a local farmer’s market to buy ingredients for elaborate home-cooked meals.
Over coffee in the mornings and wine in the evenings, we exchanged travel stories and discussed our many shared interests. I’d learned prior to my arrival that Mark was a talented photographer. I recalled swooning over his travel photography collected from a wide array of far-flung destinations and pressed to see more of his portfolio. And he obviously knew the quickest way to a blogger’s heart when he offered to take photos during my visit.
Our afternoons were spent exploring the small city of Vršac. He made sure I experienced the best of the best–the best local burek, the best nightclub playing turbo folk, the best viewpoints.
Upon learning of my wine obsession, he even arragned a trip to a local family-owned winery–Vršac is located in the heart of Serbia’s wine region, after all.
His enthusiasm for Serbia was contagious. I quickly came to realized that it wasn’t just enthusiasm for his adopted country, but his enthusiasm for life in general.
I quickly grew to respect Mark’s tenacity–he’d achieved a level of near fluency in Serbian within 8 months, simply by spending time with his family members who spoke no English. The night we were invited for dinner at his aunt and uncle’s home, I listened in awe as the language filled the room around me, drowned out occasionally by raucous laughter. Most questions directed at me were answered with a hearty “Dobro!” and a smile, and vigorous nodding for good measure.
In a city I’d never heard of, surrounded by people I’d only just met, and with whom I could hardly communicate, I felt welcome. I felt safe.
That night and those four days in Vršac never would have happened had I not put my trust in this stranger, and this story I would not have to tell had I not trusted myself.
It’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction of mistrust as a solo female traveler.
It feels like the best course of action, to protect yourself by taking every possible precaution. But this doesn’t come without a price.
In refusing to trust strangers while traveling, you run the risk of missing out on human connection–and what is travel without human connection?
I’ll never forget Mark’s selfless generosity, and I fully intend to pay it forward one day; to be the stranger that gives without question and expects nothing in return, the stranger that becomes a friend.
Travel continues to be my greatest teacher, and when it comes to knowing who to trust, the lesson I’ve learned is this: When I trust myself and my instincts, I always end up trusting the right people.
Would you stay with someone you don’t know while traveling solo? How do you decide who to trust?
