Travelling as an Introvert: Fostering My Personal Space For a Deeper Connection to the World

I’ve been wondering how has introversion hindered me from meeting people that could’ve had enriched my travel experience. After all, isn’t that one of the reasons I wanted to travel anyways? Should I’ve been more outgoing? Shouldn’t I have gotten home with prospect opportunities, tons of new emails and recollections of people I met on the road?

Let me contextualize

I’ve just finished the trip of a lifetime and now after 5 months, I’m back home.
I never was a person of many friends, I’m a loner and an introvert that enjoys planning parties more than attending them. Aloneness to me is freedom—aloneness, not isolation though.

When traveling there’s a natural inclination to gravitate to other travelers: we’re all in a foreign place with great stories to tell and valid opinions to share. Family and friends are back home and there’s a guy at your hostel with a similar adventurer spirit. Common ground, easy! So after 5 minutes of small talk, he wants to know what are you doing tomorrow, asks if he can join you and you say: “Sure.”

Well, a month had gone by into my trip when I lost the patience to hear rowdy backpacker’s stories about where they’ve been or where they were planning to go next. Honestly, I never cared about how many beers were drunk the night before, or their bias opinions about X country —mainly because they always tended to come up at the entrance of the epic monuments I always wanted to visit.

I just felt that the place I was deserved my full attention. After all, I spent years waiting for the opportunity to be there.

So I started to withdraw from people

Bearing in mind that we all have limited time to get to know a place when we’re on the road, I realized that I rather do it by myself without the distractions of casual chitchat, or the awkward moments of silence because it was my turn to say something back. I love silence, and I always preferred contemplation over a conversation.

The internal struggle

The thing is that I also envy the stories of travelers meeting someone that radically changed their travel plans, turned into a job opportunity overseas, or ended up as a lifelong friendship. The stories about being approached by a monk and talking for hours about life and god, or the ones about how fun it was bargaining at the market.

Why hasn’t that happened to me? Am I that disconnected or is it my body language? Where is this frustration coming from anyways? I hate bargaining, it makes me cringe—I rather use coupons, it’s more refined.

Maybe I didn’t open myself more because I was never alone to begin with. I traveled with Nuno and we have a dynamic that works. We know each other and we tend to wander by ourselves for hours, only talking about it at the end of the day or during dinner.

I know I’m missing out on getting to know other travelers with which I could share tips and tricks on the best guesthouses, food stalls or transportation. And locals that could teach me more about their culture and cool unknown places to visit. But I don’t open myself easily.

Frankly, visiting most of the places on my own allowed me to be fully present in them. I could orient my focus to what spoke to me: I was aware of details, colors, lights, and smells. I now remember details perfectly and I do so because my mind wasn’t divided between where I was, and small talk with a new acquaintance. Isn’t that a sign of a fulfilled experience?

Now that I’m back home I’d like to take everybody I know to the places I’ve been. I want to share the food with my family, take my close friends to the most amazing viewpoints and swim with everybody in warm tropical waters.
Maybe I never felt the need to make new friends because I have good ones back home. Maybe I unconsciously realized that the opportunity I sought after was to do everything a second time with them by my side.
Then again, I don’t have that many friends anyway, so it would be quite a private excursion.