
“Because it’s there,” said George Leigh Mallory, as he prepared to scale Mount Everest. Many people think these words were uttered by Edmund Hillary, the first man to conquer Mount Everest in 1953, but it was Mallory who said these words three decades earlier.
Imagine if that was your attitude towards the vast world around us—because it’s out there. Imagine if you’re not deterred from going for lack of companions. There are 195 countries in the world to choose from, and the only deterrence, really, is budget. If you’re lucky enough to live where there are low-cost airlines and your nearest neighboring state or country is an hour’s flight or a train ride away, what are you still doing at home?
I started traveling solo in my late twenties. Back in the late 1990s to the early 2000s, many cultures still frowned upon young women traipsing around the world alone, especially Asian women—most especially Filipino women. It just wasn’t done.
I remember being at Milan’s Duomo and asking a Filipino family to take my picture. One of them asked, “Sinong kasama mo?” (Who are you traveling with?). I said I was alone. They replied, “Kawawa ka naman” (Oh pity you/poor you). I was so pissed by their attitude more than I was pissed by the blurred photo they took.
It’s not that I don’t want to travel with friends. It’s that not having anyone with me never stopped me from traveling. With this attitude and an impractical view on my personal finances, plus my former job, I have now traveled to 53 countries.
Thankfully, the times have changed. Millennials and Gen Z no longer wait for their family to plan their first trip abroad, they do it with their friends; they book flights online without having to ask permission from anyone; they do their own research to find places that are safe and friendly to females traveling solo (some places are not).
Courage, flexibility
Traveling solo has given me the courage to fulfill my bucket list, then create a second and a third one. It has taught me not to do things for clout, but because it’s what I want to do. Not to go to places just for that stamp on my passport, but instead go back to places I love, again and again.
Of all my solo travels, it was to a string of neighboring countries that best represents the advantages of doing it solo and the courage it takes to do it. In 2017, I finally fulfilled my long-held desire to travel to the Balkans.
I don’t have a set of “travel friends” and not a single friend was interested, so I did it alone. The guided tours were too expensive, so I made my own itinerary.
At the time, while some Balkan countries were part of the EU they were not part of the Schengen visa scheme for third-party passports like the Philippines. But having a US and Schengen visa did allow me entry without applying for each Balkan country I visited. There were immigration checks between borders back then.
I started in Turkey to visit some friends in Istanbul. Then I spent a few days in Budapest before flying to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a young student in the 1980s I was fascinated by the Balkan War and the First World War. I wanted to see the former Yugoslav states that were targeted for ethnic cleansing.
As tourists, we go to France or Italy knowing what kind of people we’d meet along the way, even though it’s mostly based on stereotypes in mass media. With the Balkan countries, I had no idea. I didn’t know the attitudes of Serbians, Croatians or Macedonians. And that unknown excited me. For the first time in a long time, I was going to experience something totally new.
In Sarajevo, I rented a car. At the first stoplight after the airport, two policemen flagged me down for beating the red light. When you’re in a country so foreign to you, playing the dumb tourist is probably the best way to get out of such an infraction. They didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak Bosnian or Serbo-Croatian. In the end, they not only let me go, they convoyed me to my hotel!
From Sarajevo, I drove to Dubrovnik, Croatia, making a stop in the town of Mostar, famous for its Ottoman bridge Stari Most. Many of the Balkan countries were ruled directly by the Ottoman Empire and some of them still retain the built structures or markets, like Bosnia and North Macedonia, but not Serbia where you hardly find a trace of the former superpower.
From Mostar, I drove to Dubrovnik, which I really wanted to see because I was a hardcore fan of Game of Thrones (GOT). That’s the advantage of solo travel: you go where you want for any reason.
My addiction to GOT made me go to places like Dubrovnik, which was King’s Landing on the show; Seville in Spain, where they shot Dorne or the southernmost kingdom of Westeros; the ancient Spanish city of Ithalica, whose amphitheater was the “dragon pit” on the show; and Malta, where they shot many scenes from the early seasons, including where Ned Stark was beheaded and where the Starks arrive at Red Keep in Season 1.
The entire Old City of Dubrovnik, meanwhile, is where GOT filmed throughout its eight-year run on HBO. In 2017, there were so many GOT walking tours offered. You just had to book and find your group at Pile Square next to the fountain.
Local people perspective
In Dubrovnik, I returned the car I had rented in Sarajevo and got on a ferry to Budva, Montenegro, where I rented another car. Budva is a resort town with beautiful, sandy beaches. It is more expensive than Sarajevo but less expensive than Dubrovnik.
Montenegro has two main tourist destinations: Budva and Kotor. The latter is where the humongous cruise ships dock in the summer causing traffic and overcrowding. But since I was traveling at the beginning of autumn, it was more quiet and the temperature was less hot.
If you drive outside Kotor Bay to Perast, you will be pleasantly surprised by the huge karst mountains on one side of the road and water on the other side. Think of El Nido’s stunning limestone cliffs and multiply their size by 20 or 30.
My plan was to drive along the coast to Tirana, Albania, but since Montenegro had such a laid back atmosphere I decided to skip it and stay. A few days later, I flew to Serbia from Tivat airport, which is just 17 kilometers from Budva, rather than the bigger airport in the capital Podgorica 60 km away. (I would visit Podgorica over the Orthodox Easter the following year, from Barcelona.)
The capital city of Serbia, Belgrade, is less touristy than Kotor. Here, I took a walking tour that included a memorial to the victims of the NATO bombing of a TV station. Having been to Sarajevo first and having read about the war, it was interesting to see it from the Serbian perspective. Serbia’s leaders would later be convicted of genocide and other war crimes, but the country suffered immense damage and human casualties too.
Spontaneity, self-reflection
In and between countries, I had so much time to reflect about myself and the places I was in. Because it was a long vacation for me and took months to plan, I realized that while I enjoyed booking some things early to save money, I still wanted a loose itinerary so I could take it slow. This would be a huge factor in my decision post-pandemic to choose relative freedom over a stable job with benefits, especially since remote work is more accepted now.
A Croatian in Dubrovnik told me the week before that Skopje, the capital of Macedonia (now North Macedonia), has a lot of statues. I said, doesn’t every European capital? You’ll see, he said.
I had forgotten about this conversation until I reached Skopje. Damn, it does have a lot of statues, gaudy embellishments, and Neoclassical buildings that looked empty. How many? There are 285 statues in Skopje’s urbanized area. The entire city’s density is 65 inhabitants per hectare; Metro Manila, for comparison, is about 234 people per hectare.
Skopje was remodeled starting in 2010 and launched in 2014 because the government wanted to make it more visually appealing and to “reclaim aspects of its history from Greece.” For many years, the two countries bickered over the name Macedonia, a name Greece opposed when the country adopted it in 1991, upon the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the former states became independent. Finally, in 2019, Macedonia became North Macedonia.
A local told me that the dispute goes way back to Alexander the Great, a king of Macedonia. Some historians and Greeks claim Alexander to be Greek.
“Clearly he was Macedonian,” locals say.
“But he was of Greek descent,” historians would say.
Maybe he was both? If the blood running through his veins was Greek but he chose to fight for Macedonia, could he not be claimed by both? In Skopje, if you so much as suggest that, you will be met with a withering look.
From Skopje, my plan was to do a day visit to Lake Ohrid, south of Skopje and near the Albanian border, go back to Skopje and drive to Kosovo the following day.
The joke in the Balkans is that there are two capital cities you can skip entirely: Podgorica in Montenegro and Pristina in Kosovo. But I was curious about Kosovo, because like Bosnia, Serbia’s Milosevic wanted to expel the Albanians here and make the Serbs the dominant population. Even when the International Court in 2010 recognized Kosovo’s declaration of independence, Serbia rejected it.
It was raining on my last two days in Skopje and so I walked among the city’s statues and Neoclassical buildings. Sure they’re gaudy, but at night they looked beautiful (oh if only they weren’t sitting shoulder to shoulder!). Thinking about their centuries-long dispute with Greece, I began to understand—or at least guess—why they built so many of them.
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