I have mastered the art of small talk.
How could I not when all of a sudden it’s 8am and I’m sharing a sink with a girl from the Netherlands, introducing myself through a mouth full of toothpaste while 2 German guys wait in line for the shower and a hungover Australian dude is collapsing on the toilet, but you don’t know if it’s food poisoning or one too many drinks last night. How could I not after the person in the bunk above me dropped their water bottle on my face in the middle of the night? “Yeah no worries bro, I was having a bad dream anyways. Thanks.”
“What’s your name? Where are you from? Where have you been? How old are you? And the occasional: how do you afford all this? To see if I’m talking to a drug dealer or not. The questions are always the same, but the answers rarely matter. Unless it’s yes to the last one and they follow up with “do you want some coke?”.... Kiddingggggggggg. The point is that it’s all small talk, but in some way it’s actually big talk. Because it’s proof of the curiosity that we all share not just in travel, but in each other.
If there is anything I have learned in my short time of solo travel, it’s that it has this unique and universal way of making so many different people, all of the sudden, the same. We share the markings of backpack straps on our shoulders, sandal tan lines on our feet, and bracelets of the places we’ve been. We don’t scroll Instagram, we scroll the local bus schedule instead, and sooner or later we learn that less is more. One minute you're walking into the dorm room as the “new guy” and then the next you're jumping off a 40-ft cliff with a group of people you don’t know if you’ll ever even see again. You share stories and things about yourself that you’ve never even admitted to family or friends back home. You can be as much or as less of anything you want. At home, meeting strangers feels awkward, but on the road it’s somehow easy. Maybe it’s because people don’t know your history and you get to be whoever you want to be or maybe it’s because a couple days of not knowing the native language makes you desperate to connect.
It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you’re from, or what you do for a living, because we’re all facing the same unasked question, “what do you want to do with your life?” It just so happens that we chose travel as our way of finding the answer. Some days I wake up ready for adventure, other days I feel like I’m just desperately hiding from a routine. The truth is probably both. Between pub crawls, shitty eSIMs, and chicken buses you’re either running toward something or away from it. Either way it doesn't matter though because, when you’re traveling this way, the pace is set for you. You can’t hide from your problems and you can’t run from them. The buses can only go so fast, and your feet can only walk so far with a 40-lb bag on your back. It’s funny, I thought this trip would fix my problems. Instead, it stripped me bare and threw me into the fire. I thought distance and wild adventures would solve things, but really it just removed me from the distractions that kept me from noticing them. Out here the silence is too loud to ignore and the bus rides are too long not to think. You're forced to face your issues, but hey, at least the views are nice.
There is an instant and mutual understanding of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it when two solo travelers meet that is unexplainable and goes without saying. If you’re crazy enough to do this alone, and I’m crazy enough too…well, I guess we’re friends then. In the end, maybe we’re all just a little crazy. Crazy enough to believe that getting lost might actually bring us closer to finding ourselves. I’ve laughed with complete strangers like they were my oldest friends and I’ve found perspectives in people that I’ll probably never see again. That’s the beauty of traveling this way: we’re all chasing the answer to the same question, even if it’s never asked out loud. Each morning it might be a different stranger at the sink, but we’re brushing away at the same truth.