OCTOBER 24, 2025 | FEATURES | By Fiona Frankel
Walking back to my hostel in Porto, Portugal, I saw smoke first, furling softly through the night’s air in gray wisps. As I rounded the corner, a nose and chin emerged, followed by a delicate neck absent of the protrusion of an Adam’s apple.
I breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the woman—thankfully, a woman—glanced my way before returning to her cigarette silently. I continued walking alone through the winding, cobblestone streets of the city, appreciating the yellow glow of the night while remaining on high alert.
I love to walk alone. I’m fast, often making it to my destination in two-thirds the time of the Google Maps projection. And in new cities, I find it to be the best way to get to know my surroundings. The solitude and freedom to wander provide me with a familiarity to a place that I have yet to find any other way.
My best finds have been accidental while walking, whether it’s an inexpensive secondhand shop on the streets of Barcelona or rounding a corner to unexpectedly face the magnificent beauty of the Cologne Cathedral. No matter the city, I always feel somewhat familiarized by the end of day after spending ten or fifteen miles on its streets.
Walking while traveling is affordable, effective, and enjoyable. It’s also dangerous. My Spanish thrift store find, though my favorite to this day, was the result of being followed for several blocks by a male stranger who continually tried to talk to me, leading me to duck into the first store I could find.
My evening stroll in Edinburgh ended as I darted out of a bustling pub after a man who spent 10 minutes trying to convince me to go home with him grabbed my waist in insistence. That walk led me past the beauty of the Scott Monument and Edinburgh Castle, while I kept an eye over my shoulder as I ran back to my hostel.
A term with an extensive thread on Reddit, “solo female travel” is inundated with women recommending the best (i.e. safest) destinations for their peers, littered with advice on how to protect oneself, crime against women statistics by country and where to stay to guarantee safety.
It’s also a term I will never use to describe myself when meeting new people while traveling; at least, definitively, not the first word. I’ve visited 11 countries on my own. Yet to any man I meet on these journeys, I’m purportedly traveling with my sister or a friend. Better yet, my brother or my boyfriend.
Especially as an American, I am never inclined to make a scene, to give in to the stereotype of the disruptive, rude tourist shouting in English in a foreign country. The common sentiment among women of ‘just not wanting to be rude’ becomes more pronounced as I solo travel, eager to connect positively with strangers and avoid antagonizing anyone.
‘Not wanting to be rude’ follows me everywhere, when a hand inching down my lower back in a crowded bar warrants not a yell but rather a strained expression towards any stranger in the vicinity, impossibly conveying a frantic plea for help. It is what turns constant hands snaking up our skirts at Spanish nightclubs to become anecdotes we share the next morning, shaking our heads as if nonconsensual groping is an equivalent nuisance to the inflated cost of a cab at the end of the night.
Existing at the intersection of outspoken and friendly is an untouched plane for women, an impossibility when every word of protest—“leave me alone,” or “don’t touch me”—is instantly characterized as bitchiness. Adding a “please” to begin only slightly mitigates this perception, simultaneously weakening the request.
At the same time, it is a shared experience among many solo female travelers, an unfortunate unifier transcending language, culture and nationality. It is a communal burden we carry unthinkingly—few women pay the extra fare for female-only rooms with frustration or lament the unfairness of rarely being able to safely walk alone at night.
Solo travel, particularly for women, is a simultaneous burden and opportunity. It has provided me with countless chances to meet, connect and befriend dozens of incredible women, unconsciously bonded by shared experiences.
Throughout every opportunity, though my disappointment in the universality of these encounters grows, as does my appreciation for the unique community that can only be built by traveling, independent women.