Traveling safely is a concern for anyone, especially for solo travelers. It’s even more important for female solo travelers. While I can give you plenty of tips for traveling solo, I’m a guy, and so I felt it was more appropriate to ask my friend Candice Elliott to give some advice on how women can stay safe while traveling by themselves:
During the pandemic, those of us who were still traveling had a top concern, the safety of our health. How clean was the air on an airplane? What measures had our hotel taken to clean the room between guests? What if we did catch Covid while abroad? As those fears have subsided, we can go back to our previous top concern, our safety. Something female travelers are especially concerned about.
There are all sorts of gadgets to help keep us safe, wedges that go under hotel room doors that can be very handy in the absence of a deadbolt, personal alarms, whistles, and luggage locks to protect our valuables. But you already possess the most effective way to stay safe while traveling, and it doesn’t cost a thing…
My Old Stomping Grounds
I lived in New York City from 2000-2016 before I moved to New Orleans. I go back regularly because I miss my friends, the Metropolitan Museum, running on the Bridle Path in Central Park, and bacon, egg, and cheese (locally known as a BEC) on a roll from the corner bodega.
Even over the nearly seven years I’ve been gone, New York has changed a lot. New stores, new buildings, and favorite restaurants have closed. But it doesn’t change so much that it doesn’t still feel a lot like home. So the usual level of “high alert” that I’m on when I travel is not quite so high when I’m in New York because New York is familiar and comfortable to me. In the 16 years I lived there, I was never the victim of a crime, not even a package stolen out of the mailroom!
And I never felt unsafe. Partly because living in cities for so long teaches you to be street smart and partly because there are almost always other people around, in some cases, lots and lots of other people.
Madison Avenue on a Friday Night
The last time I was in New York was in November of 2019. I was meeting up with my former neighbor/current friend to go to Europe. Because I missed so much about the city, I went a few days early so I could spend some time before we departed on our vacation.
A friend and I went to dinner and then back to her new place, which I hadn’t seen. It was on Madison Avenue in the mid-60s. If you know the area, you know it’s mostly expensive retail stores, so pretty deserted on a Friday night around 9:00pm.
When I left her apartment, it was dark but hardly late at night and in a safe neighborhood. I had zero concerns about my safety. I walked out of the apartment building and started to walk down the sidewalk, and “a little voice” said to me, “Turn around; there’s someone behind you.”
So I did, and sure enough there was! But I wasn’t scared yet. I walked to the corner and crossed the street. He did the same. I crossed again, and he did the same. Now I’m getting nervous and have to make a decision. The next avenue in the direction I was heading was Park Avenue, which is even more deserted than Madison, as Park is almost entirely residential.
I start walking back toward Madison because there is a bodega there, and bodegas don’t close, baby, one of the many reasons they’re one of New York City’s greatest institutions. I’m crisscrossing to see if whoever this is, is actually following me. He clearly is. The last glimpse I had was him peeking around one of those red alarm call boxes. That’s when I really started to get scared.
You often think about what you might do in various scenarios, and it’s always way more badass than what you actually do. So no, I did not demand, “What the F**K is your problem, my guy!” or karate kick him.
Not even close. I legged it into the bodega, where I explained to the Papi working what had happened. And because bodega workers are stand-up people, he went outside, hailed me a cab, and made sure I got inside. I made it back to my former neighbor’s where I was staying without further incident.
The Gift of Fear
So where did that “little voice” come from, and more importantly, why had I listened to it? That little voice goes by various names: sixth sense, intuition, gut feeling, Spidey sense. It’s something humans and animals inherently have and have probably had since the beginning of time. It warns us of danger!
Milleniums ago, the danger might have been a saber tooth tiger stalking us. For me, it was the guy on the street behind me.
So why does that little voice not always save us? Well, nothing is foolproof, of course, but for women, it’s because we often ignore it; we tamp it down. Women are conditioned to be polite, not to hurt someone’s feelings, not to “make a scene.”
So that little voice tells us not to get on that parking garage elevator with that man, but we don’t listen because it seems rude or crazy. It tells us not to leave the bar with that guy, but we don’t want to hurt his feelings after he spent all night talking to us and buying us drinks. When we ignore that little voice, bad things can happen to us. We can end up on the next crime podcast.
The reason I listen to that voice is, again, partly because living in a city makes you street-smart. But probably the primary reason is a book I read years ago, called The Gift of Fear.
The book was written by Gavin de Becker, a private security specialist, and it talks about how important that little voice is and how trusting it and listening to it can save us from harm. I’m 100% certain it saved me that night. From what exactly? I don’t know. The guy probably just wanted to snatch my purse. But maybe he had worse intentions; I don’t know. I just know he was some kind of threat to me, and listening to my little voice saved me from a bad situation.
If you’re a female traveler, I urge you to read The Gift of Fear and to always listen to your little voice. So what if you hurt someone’s feelings, or you’re rude, or you make a scene? You’ll be safer, and that’s all that matters. Safe travels, ladies!
