In 2017, a close friend of mine went to Udupi alone. We’d grown up together, this friend and I. We used to discuss everything, go to countless restaurants together, had our fights, made up, told each other things we wouldn’t tell anyone else. So when I heard she’d gone to Udupi alone and sat by the beach for 4 hours by herself, I was worried.
I told my mom. Mom thought she’d probably be depressed, maybe things not working out. I reached out. “Hey, are you okay? Did something happen? Someone said anything? Work is fine? You can talk to me, I’m always there for you.” She said she was fine. I thought she was hiding something. I asked her a few times again, but to no avail. I didn’t want to push too hard, so I just let her be.
She came back from the trip. I met her. She was silent in that settled and content way. Completely fine. I kept waiting for the crack, the moment she’d open up and tell me what’s going on. It never came. I didn’t get it.
I filed it as one of those things you don’t fully understand about a person and moved on.
Two years later, I had a catastrophic relationship failure. The kind that completely disorients you and you don’t know what to do, what to think, where to go. You replay things on a loop. You don’t want advice, you don’t want company, you don’t want to explain yourself to anyone who’s going to say “bro she wasn’t worth it” while reaching for another drink.
It was a Friday evening. Everyone around me was gearing up for the usual weekend circuit. Alcohol, drugs, parties, noise. I couldn’t do it. I sat with the feeling for a while and then impulsively made up my mind to just disappear for the weekend.
I packed 2 shirts, 2 pants, toiletries. Rolled 2 joints. Opened Redbus and booked a ticket to Kodaikanal. Heard it was pretty and all that. 10PM bus, thought I’d figure the rest out when I got there. I was 25 then and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
The bus ride was barely fun. My head was loud. What will I do there alone? Will I just end up calling friends from some hotel room? What would my friends think if they knew? I’m travelling alone. I’m lonely. Will someone rob me? Will something happen? The thoughts kept coming, overlapping, circling. Outside the window it was just highway dark. Kept staring at it and dozed away after a few hours.
I reached Kodai sometime in the morning. It looked beautiful, slightly foggy and drizzling. But oh my, what a touristy chaotic place it was. Autodrivers selling their 200 rupees for 2km, families eating masala puri by the lake, children running, everyone in groups. Obviously I hadn’t booked any accommodation. So I walked into the nearest hotel out of habit, 3K a night.
While waiting in the queue, I was scrolling through a solo traveller’s guide to Kodaikanal and came across the word “hostel.” People were losing their heads over them in the comments. Just 400 rupees a night? 4.9 stars with hundreds of reviews. I had no idea what a backpacker’s hostel even was. I googled one nearby and found something called Greenlands. I walked straight out of the hotel queue.
Reached this place expecting something dingy and damp. But as I checked in and entered the dorm, it was spotless, like the fancy American prisons they show in movies. Each bed had a charger next to it, a reading light, and the wifi name and password written right there on a little card. That was it, but for some reason, in that moment, it felt like the most considerate setup in the world because that was genuinely all I needed. There were a few backpackers in their beds, half awake and looking at their phones. Some beds were empty but clearly lived in, with bags left open and a towel hanging off a bunk here and there. It had the exact vibe of a hostel at IITM. People living their life, living together, sharing joy and sorrow, but everyone quietly on their own path.
I dropped my bag, kept my phone and wallet, and walked out.
The common area outside opened onto a valley. Big, open, quietly beautiful. There were 7-8 people sitting in a loose circle, laughing, smoking. Some foreigners, some Indians. One of them spotted me approaching and just gestured, easy and natural, come sit.
My first instinct was “who the fuck are you and why do you care?”
But I sat down anyway. Just to be polite.
And then it just started flowing. Someone was describing a funny uncle they’d encountered on a jungle trail. Someone was asking around for mushrooms. Someone was talking about a waterfall nobody knew about. I started asking questions. People asked me questions back. Where are you from, how long are you here, first time in Kodai?
Then one guy mentioned, casually, that he’d been in Gokarna for a month before this. Coorg for two weeks before that. And Greenlands for the past three months.
I stopped. Three months?
He said it like it was the most normal thing. Like time was just something you moved through at your own pace and nobody had told him otherwise. I didn’t know what to do with that information. It cracked something open in my head. I sat there trying to process it while the conversation kept flowing around me.
There was legit no performance in that circle. No bitching about work, no gossip, no navigating who thinks what about whom. It was just strangers talking about where they’d been and what they’d felt. I was completely, fully myself without any history, role or script. Two hours passed like nothing. The group dissolved naturally when people started drifting toward lunch.
Walking to a famous appam place I kept thinking, what the fuck just happened. Who were those people. I felt more energised than I had in weeks.
After lunch I started thinking “what’s the plan”, the typical itinerary mindset. I started looking up places people had mentioned, trying to build a loose plan in my head.
And then mid-thought, I had a wild realisation. Do I really need to do anything? I had absolutely no obligation to do anything at all.
Often times, when you’re at leisure, small thoughts feel revolutionary. This was one of them.
I went back to the common area and sat on a bench facing the valley. It was drizzling, that soft persistent Kodai drizzle that’s pretty much always on in monsoons. I didn’t care. I lit my smoke and just sat there.
The breakup thoughts came and moved around for a while and then slowly, without any effort on my part, they started becoming background noise. Didn’t disappear obviously, just became softer. The valley was right there. The drizzle was right there. I did some photography, sent a few shots to friends. They said it’s beautiful. That felt good. I sat there for two, maybe three hours until the rain picked up properly and made the decision for me.
At some point in those hours I realised I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this fully present in my own life - maybe when I was as a kid making clay castles in the backyard.
I came back from that trip different. Don’t want to say fixed or healed - it was just something different. The trip was deeply transformative - I made friends that I meet till today, I had experiences that I was afraid of earlier, I spent a good amount of time with myself to understand what I was thinking. A new universe had opened up for me - I was sure of something I couldn’t fully name yet.
The first call I made was to my friend from 2017. The one I’d worried about, pushed gently, waited for to crack open. I told her about Kodaikanal. About the hostel, the circle, the bench, the valley, all of it.
I’ve travelled mostly solo since then. Reunion trips happen, wedding trips, treks with friends, I do those too and I love them for what they are. But when I’m planning a vacation, it’s always solo. It’s not even a preference anymore, it’s just the only thing that makes sense.
A hostelmate once said something that stuck with me. “In India they call it solo travelling, elsewhere it’s just travelling.” He was right. The label itself is an Indian thing, maybe a broader developing-world thing, in a densely populated country where being alone reads as suspicious. The assumption baked into it is that travelling alone is unusual, brave, slightly sad. Elsewhere it’s just the default. You go where you want to go. If someone happens to be going the same direction, great. If not, also great. The solo is silent because it doesn’t need to be said.
And even calling it solo is a misnomer. You’re never really alone. You’re in a smoking circle for two hours with strangers who become oddly familiar. You’re asking a local for directions and ending up with a restaurant recommendation that changes your afternoon. You’re talking to the guy who’s been living at Greenlands for three months and your entire idea of time and freedom quietly shifts. You’re travelling with people constantly, just people who don’t carry your history. That’s the whole point.
Think about why you actually travel. New places, new food, new cultures, running away from your routine long enough to see it clearly, exposing yourself to ideas you wouldn’t encounter at home, sitting with nature, reflecting, being genuinely surprised by something. These are the real reasons. And every single one of them is diluted when you bring someone from your regular life along. Not because they’re bad company, but because their presence keeps you anchored to who you already are. Your dynamic is set, your roles are fixed, and you move through new places inside a familiar bubble while the new places don’t quite get in.
When you travel alone, that bubble is gone. Nobody has a prior on you. You’re a vagabond with no history. You can be whoever you actually are right now, today, not who you were to this person three years ago. Some people will like you, some won’t. Doesn’t matter. There’s no performance because there’s no audience that knows the script.
Now, travelling with friends is a real and beautiful thing. I want to be clear about that. But if you’re honest about what it is, it’s more about the relationship than the travel. You’re using a beautiful place as a backdrop to connect, to share a moment, to deepen something between you. And that’s not just valid, it adds a beautiful dimension to relationships. But the place becomes the vehicle, not the point. It’s a different thing altogether.
Solo travel is different. The place is the point. The moment is the point. You are the point.
People ask me if I feel lonely. I don’t. You’re alone when you want to be alone and talking to people when you feel like it. It’s entirely on your terms.
People ask me if I feel scared. I don’t. But I want to be honest here. I’m a privileged, educated and free man. The spontaneous 10PM bus, the no-booking energy, the walking into a circle of strangers without a second thought, I do all of that without a risk calculation running in the background. A lot of people can’t. The freedom I found in Kodaikanal is real but it’s also partly a function of moving through the world in the body I have, with the background I was gifted with. I hope we get to a world where everyone can access it without that extra weight.
My close friend R used to despise the idea. Hostels especially. He thought I could do it only because I’m an extrovert, a social person, which I wasn’t always. But I could never explain it to him. Then we went to Goa for a wedding and stayed at a hostel for 4 days before the ceremonies. He had an absolute blast. Drinking, talking to strangers, fooling around, fully himself in that way you can only be when nobody knows you. He didn’t quite call it solo travel, but I think it was.
That’s the thing. You can’t explain solo travel to someone who hasn’t felt it. You really can’t. You can describe the valley and the drizzle and the smoking circle and the guy who’d been living at Greenlands for three months. But the actual thing, that specific freedom, that specific presence, that feeling of being nobody’s anything for a few days, it doesn’t travel through words.
I’d actually forgotten most of this. The friend episode in 2017, the 10PM bus, the smoking circle, the bench in the drizzle. It all came back when I found this memoir sitting in an old folder on my laptop after returning from Uttarakhand last week. I’d written it immediately after Kodaikanal, when everything was still raw and fresh and new. Reading it felt like meeting a stranger who was somehow me. Naive, shelled-in, but innocent and curious in a way that was almost tender to look at.
He didn’t know yet how many trips were coming. How many valleys, how many smoking circles, how many 10PM buses. How this thing that cracked open on a drizzly bench in Kodai would quietly become the architecture of his life.
And somewhere out there, right now, someone is about to take their first solo trip without knowing it will change them. They’re probably a little scared, maybe a little lonely feeling, convincing themselves they need a plan. They don’t. The valley will do the rest.
The word tanha in Urdu means alone. Lonely. There’s a sadness built into it.
But I have sat alone in the rain facing valleys, eaten meals with no one to talk to, slept in rooms full of strangers, ridden buses through the dark not knowing where I’d wake up, and I have never, not once, felt tanha.
Go find out for yourself.