TRAVELING ALONE By australian travel writer Nina Karnikowski www.travelswithnina.com So there I was. I’d just arrived in the yoga capital of the world - Rishikesh in India, where The Beatles famously found enlightenment – and already I was in floods of tears. I’d taken an 18-hour overnight bus there. It was old, it was cramped, it was overcrowded, and I barely got one hour’s sleep. When I finally got to Rishikesh, my tuk-tuk driver promised to take me to the ashram I was meant to be staying at, then dropped me in town instead. I’d lugged my swollen suitcase across the metre-wide Laxman Jhula bridge, crammed with beggars, motorbikes, cows, and hordes of Indian tourists, in the 100-degree midday sun. I reached the other side only to be told I’d have to take a seven-minute taxi to the ashram, that would cost me more than the entire overnight bus trip... And with that, the tears. Tears that didn’t manage to get me a discount on the taxi, but that did make me realize how much I needed the week by myself in that place of spiritual reflection. I’ve shed a lot of these kinds of tears over the past seven years. Ever since I launched into the travel writing world and started adventuring from Russia to India, Zambia to Morocco, Chile to Peru and beyond, all by myself. I call them the ‘lone traveler tears,’ brought on by those moments of fear, frustration, and loneliness that the solo adventurer so often feels. But, over time, I’ve started to cry less often. Because I’ve developed four golden rules that I use whenever I hit the road alone, to avoid being ripped off or taken advantage of. First up, I make sure that I always look confident, even when I’m not. If you look
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