Top Tourist-Friendly Activities for Solo Travelers

Solo travel allows you to discover everything that you are drawn to – the buzz of the big city, the regional culture of food and wine, riding a bike over a long distance, or taking climbing lessons or throwing a pot on a pottery wheel!

And in the once mysterious ‘land of fire and ice’, Icelandic solo travel provides a plethora of volcanoes, geysers and waterfalls.

Walking Tours

Walking tours offer a resonant way of engaging with a destination, invite participants to be a part of a group or not as they choose. Become an expert on your city, and meet fellow travellers. Food or cooking classes can also be good for socialising. Get to know local culture at ground level – whether taking a guided walking tour of Hadrian’s Wall in England or taking a soak in one of Hot Springs, Arkansas’s hot springs – you will know intimately where you are going.

Shopping

One of the simple pleasures of solo travel yourself a treat when you decide to spend the afternoon relaxing in a spa — for your own enjoyment yes, but also to enrich a local small business and make your travel a little greener. Carmel-by-the-Sea is intimate and quaint, like a village at the seashore; it makes for dramatic photographic opportunities when dusted with snow during winter. For its hospitality and bourbon, but also its crop of hip bars and restaurants, Louisville is a city of contrasts where old meets new — from the trendy NuLu neighbourhoods running alongside historic downtown Louisville to newer, up-and-coming’ food focus.

Bars and Coffee Shops

A cosy coffee shop or bar is the perfect place for an independent traveller to recharge the batteries, catch some people-watching and sip decent drinks and play along with local characters. The beach town atmosphere and art galleries of Carmel-by-the-Sea in California, or the hot springs in Hot Springs in Arkansas, where guests can bathe in natural thermal spring water pools, are all good alternatives. Food tours are another great way to meet people at the same time as you’re exploring your destination. Comprising tastings of wine, beer and specialty foods and offered in groups of 12-15, food tours are another excellent alternative to restaurants for dining solo, since you’ll have people to talk to and there will be less of a stigma attached to dining alone than you might encounter at a restaurant.

Listening to Music

Research music can certainly be a portal to other times or places. My question for you now is: what does your travel playlist sound like? Embark on a musical sojourn. Music is the environment where solo travellers can make a deepest mark in their minds: elegant opera in Budapest, groundbreaking electronic music festival Tomorrowland in Belgium, and all-night jamming in Tomorrowland in Belgium… In other words, taking part in performances can help solo travellers make new friends, talk to locals who can’t speak the same language, create memories, and never imagine any judgmental comments by the others!

Meandering Off the Beaten Path

So, while junk food might have its own thrills for frequent fliers, off-the-beaten-path travel has the advantage of being more interesting. A tourist can learn a lot of things, but those who can tolerate and experience native customs and food can travel more bizarrely and amazingly than those whose travels are plotted meticulously in guidebooks. In Carmel-by-the-Sea in California, wanderers will find no shortage of art galleries or the village centre, while those who seek outdoor adventures can find plenty of hiking, kayaking and biking trails along riverbanks and mountainsides. Botswana offers great wildlife safari travel accessible to solo travellers and comes in at a high safety ranking among African destinations.

Trail Walks

Trail walks are the perfect solo travel pastime where you can explore at your own pace. Whether it’s ambling along Savannah’s tree-lined cobblestone streets or huffing and puffing up New York’ walks allow for travelling at one’s own pace and discovering so much on your own! Having never backpacked before, Cheryl Strayed, the protagonist of Wild, traversed 2,000 miles of the PCT in just under six months from the Sunshine State, initially traversing it through California to just north of the Oregon border. Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang traverses much of the same land, now divided into a host of national parks and wilderness areas, through which the protagonists travel the Hayduke Trail.