Winging it solo

After months of planning a precocious itinerary around Italy's cultural sites, my travel buddy informed me (two weeks before our intended departure) that she had actually frittered away all of her gap year savings. Nevertheless, as a naively independent 19-year-old I went anyway - I hadn't worked at Pizza Hut for 8 months to put it towards university. Arriving into Rome was disorientatingly chaotic - choking smog, crazy drivers, negotiating pushy souvenir-hawkers and worst of all: making connections with people only to have them leave the next day. It was totally exhausting, moving from place to place with expectations but also worrying uncertainty - who would I meet? The loneliness of solo travel was something I had never read about in guide books. Each short and pleasurable day I could be friends with stoic Swedes, tattooed, mysterious Chileans - and once, an Aussie having a once-in-a-mid-life-crisis trip (without the kids) but prolonged time by myself lead to self-doubt.

My lowest point was on a slow train from Rome to Naples. I'd heard discouraging things about the city from snooty northerners, was alone again - and had been so distracted in running for the train that I hadn't bought any food. I felt utter misery despite the tranquil aridity of the passing landscape of vineyards and Pliny's umbrella-pines. Then I looked up and into a beaming, olive-like face - crumpled and tanned from life as a farmer's wife. She suddenly reached across the table and stroked my hair. Instead of feeling affronted, I enjoyed her warm curiosity of unusually blonde hair. For the rest of her journey, she insisted on sharing her cheese and bread with me, clucking and poking. Just before she got off, she pressed her hand into her bosom and intoned "Sono tua nonna". Of all the incomprehensibly accented things she had said to me - this I understood.

A starry-eyed Texan on Spring Break who shared my dorm room told me it was these 'travel moments' which make us realise why we go backpacking in the first place. As much as I tried to brush this off as an American hyperbole, it was true. There were so many awesome things I experienced over future years of travel in Europe and Asia which would make a much more colourful and vivid image of adventuring the world but... it was that moment, sitting on a train and suddenly not feeling alone, that I realised I had nothing to fear. I'll never forget the day that I was adopted by my Italian granny, if only for an afternoon.