My Top 5 Women’s Solo Travel Books
There are 5 female solo travel books you just have to read….
Why?
Because they’re super inspirational and will give you boundless courage!
I love to read books about women solo travellers, and throughout the years I have read many. They fuelled my passion during the years when I craved to travel alone, but was unable to. They gave me the reassurance that I wasn’t bananas for wanting to have a solo adventure and they gave me permission to finally go for it.
I’ve read many, but five stand out as being the defining books that inspired, influenced and drove my desire to ultimately go it alone. These are the books that brought tears to my eyes in recognition that there were other people in the world like me.
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Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude by Stephanie Rosenbloom
I love this book!
Alone Time is different to your average travel memoir, in that Stephanie Rosenbloom doesn’t spend a prolonged period of time travelling. Instead, she takes four short trips to different cities in the four seasons of the year – Paris, Florence, Istanbul and New York.
The focus of the book is on the joy of spending time alone. It’s backed by lots of research and cites many psychological and sociological studies on the benefits of solitude, and recounts the experiences of artists, writers and innovators who have treasured time spent alone. If anyone is in doubt on the benefits of spending time alone, this is great book to read.
Rosenbloom shows us how travel and solitude can be deeply restorative, can enhance our creativity and fuel new passions. She discusses the art of savouring to enhance our present moment awareness and through elegant prose, guides us to slow down and see the beauty in the everyday.
Alone Time, is not an epic journey as so many solo travel books are, and that’s what I really like about the book. Instead, it’s about a woman experiencing time alone in one-week stints, which is perhaps a far more likely reality for many of us. It shows that it’s not necessary to travel far and wide, to benefit from the transformative effects of a solo journey, and in fact, the fourth season, in New York, is actually the author’s home city, and rather than a week long trip, she takes short day trips. Thus reminding us that novelty can be found not just in new locations but in the everyday, even our hometowns.
Her descriptions are vivid, elegant and compelling. As I was reading it, particularly the first season in Paris, I could almost feel and taste Paris!
Alone Time, is my most recent solo travel book discovery. I read it just before I wrote my own book ‘Solo Travel in a Relationship’, and as I was reading it I could feel myself nodding in agreement. This is a book that confirmed much of my own thoughts about spending time alone.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from Alone Time:
‘Alone, there’s no need for an itinerary. Walk, and the day arranges itself.‘
“one of the strongest predictors of happiness is whether or not your attention is focused where you are in the present.”
“It is through serendipitous encounters with objects and strangers that the world speaks to us but we have to be listening. By learning to be alert for clues, one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner adventure.”
Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman
I would love to have Rita Golden Gelman’s guts!
This is a brilliant travelogue of a woman who at the age of 48, felt stifled and unfulfilled. On the verge of divorce, she sells all her belongings and leaves an elegant life in L.A. to travel the world and live a nomadic lifestyle (long before the advent of digital nomadism!). Written in the late 80’s before mobile phones and widespread internet, this book is truly inspiring and one that I devoured and couldn’t put down. I read it about 10 years ago, and it’s messages have stuck with me since.
Gelman, wanders the globe and truly connects with the people and cultures she comes into contact with, and when I say connects, I mean she really connects. Her travels begin with her living in a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico where she is initially regarded with suspicion and as an outsider, but after she makes it clear that she is staying and wants to learn, she is quickly embraced by the community.
She stays in all types of accommodation, in all types of places and meets many different people. She visits trance healers and dens of black magic, and cooks with women over fires all over the world.
This is a hugely inspiring book, that I devoured and loved.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from Tales of a Female Nomad:
“I move throughout the world without a plan, guided by instinct, connecting through trust, and constantly watching for serendipitous opportunities.”
“My spirit gets nourished in faraway places. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a biological need, perhaps a biological flaw, that compels me to seek the excitement and challenge that comes of being in a place where nobody knows me.“
“But I’m not running away. I’m running toward… toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intriguing: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself.”
Tracks: A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson
Tracks is no ordinary solo travel book. Written in the 1970s and published in 1980, it’s an autobiographical memoir that charts Robyn Davidson’s compelling and perilous journey by foot across 1, 700 miles of the hostile Australian desert to the Indian Ocean with four camels and a dog at the age of 27. She endures unimaginable hardships – sweltering temperatures, wild animals, rampant sexism, racism and water shortages.
It’s a brutally honest, down to earth and gritty book, which in no way glorifies her journey.
In many respects it’s hard to understand why she was compelled to make such a dangerous journey alone, one that put her life in danger countless times. However, what is clear and why for me this is up there with my favourite solo travel books is that Robyn was driven by a desire for complete isolation. She wanted to strip back her identity and the illusions of society in order to see who she was with all the masks stripped back. This is something I, and I think many other solo travellers can relate to – a desire to shed the layers in order to find your true self.
Some of my favourite quotes from Tracks:
“The two things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.”
“It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.”
“I liked myself this way, it was such a relief to be free of disguises an prettiness and attractiveness. Above all that horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind. I puled my hat down over my ears so that they stuck out beneath it. ‘I must remember this when I get back. I must not fall into that trap again.’ I must let people see me as I am. Like this? Yes, why not like this. But then I realized that the rules pertaining to one set of circumstances do not necessarily pertain to another. Back there, this would just be another disguise. Back there, there was no nakedness, no one could afford it. Everyone had their social personae well fortified…”
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love is iconic and possibly the most well-known book of a woman in search of herself through travelling solo. And whilst I am sure you are no stranger to this book, I couldn’t leave it out of my Top 5.
There was a time in my life, in my late 30s, when this book was my bible. I could relate to it on many levels, and I read it several times. It gave me the reassurance that I needed to follow my heart. It helped me to understand that the underlying anxiety that I’d lived with for many years, was a result of not being true to myself. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love showed me that it was okay to shake things up, change and follow a deep yearning ache inside that I’d had for a very long time.
Eat Pray Love follows Gilbert’s journey from divorce to discovering food and pleasure in Italy, meditation and devotion in India and balance in Bali. The book is heart warming, funny and candid, and it has sent many a solo adventuress off to discover their own eat, pray and love.
Some of my favourite quotes from Eat Pray Love:
“The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.”
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
We’ve all been dinted and dented by life, and I don’t know one solo trip I’ve been on that hasn’t been a journey of padding back out some of those dents.
Travelling alone, in whatever form that takes for you, whether it’s hiking a trail like Cheryl Strayed in Wild, taking week long trips like Stephanie Rosenbloom or going full nomad like Rita Golden Gelman has a habit of loosening the binds that we’ve wrapped ourselves in, allowing us to break free and find our true authentic self.
Wild, is Cheryl Strayed’s autobiographic memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). Alone with no experience or training, only a bloody minded spirit to sort her broken life out by hiking more than a thousand miles in the wilderness.
Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, is a journey of many things. It’s a journey of self-discovery, of accepting emotional pain and hurt and of not allowing that pain to define you. It’s a journey of physical endurance and a journey of realising the power of nature and the vastness of our planet and our place within it.
It’s a great read!
Here are some of my favourite quotes from Wild:
“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”
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Hmmm….where are the books about solo travellers in relationships!?
So, I’d just finished writing this post and I suddenly realised that each of these books is about a single woman, who has either just left a marriage or who is simply single. The possible exception is Alone Time, as I don’t think Stephanie Rosenbloom reveals her relationship status.
I realised that the solo female travel book genre and indeed films, is saturated by single women and those newly divorced or separated.
Ahhh what message does this send out about solo travel?
I love all these book, but it’s no wonder that married women sometimes come up against barriers when considering a solo trip when the market is saturated with books and films about women finding themselves following divorce or separation.
Where oh where are all books about women in relationships who love to solo travel?
This was a BIG motivation for me to write my own book ‘Solo Travel in a Relationship: break through barriers to your solo journey’. A book for women with partners and husbands who want to travel alone, but are struggling to take that first step. Learn more here.
More blog posts:
A Review of ‘Journeys Beyond and Within…’ by Priyanka Gupta: a journey of self-discovery
Yes, I’m travelling solo AND I’m in a committed relationship!
Solo Travel in a Relationship – Buy the Book!
Married, Solo Travel & Reimagining Bucket Lists: An Interview with Tracy from Travel Bug Tonic