The Art of Meeting People While Travelling Solo
Lessons from the human connections who changed my journey and shaped my growth.
These are my reflections - a tribute to those friends who started out as strangers.
Tomorrow, I set off to meet a friend I crossed paths with fifteen months ago in a Moroccan hostel, and - by sheer coincidence - again eight months later in a little Peruvian coffee shop. Lieja holds a Dutch passport and grew up half a world away from me, yet within minutes of conversation it felt as if we’d tumbled out of the same womb.
Like most travel-born friendships, ours took root in spontaneity. This time, we’ll meet in the mountains of Central Asia. No plans. No itinerary. No reception. Just a patch of earth for our tents, the weight of our packs, and endless yapping to our heart’s content.
Connections like such are rare, but they remind me: this is why I travel.
The Ease of Connection
Why it’s easier than people think: There is an unspoken backpackers’ club you join effortlessly on arrival - no forms, no ceremony, just your presence. It folds you into a loose-knit tribe of wanderers who speak in smiles and curious questions. Naturally, everyone is open-minded.
“Where are you from?” or “How long have you been out?” become the traveler’s handshake. No one asks why you are traveling alone - because your reasons probably echo their own. Simple questions quickly give way to deeper conversations, and suddenly you’re connected beyond words.
Hostels, group hikes, walking tours - they are built for mingling. But sometimes meeting people happens in quieter places: a grocery store line, a shared bench, a train carriage rattling toward nowhere in particular. What pulls you together isn’t just words, but an energy exchanged - a kind of recognition that passes between you. It is invisible but electric, warm yet thrilling.
My latest reminder of this actually came today, right here in Melbourne. I was sitting in a café, working on this very blog, when a Swiss stranger at the next table - radiant of energy, spring-like on a sunny August afternoon - complimented my dress. Minutes later we were deep in conversation, weaving between stories of surfing in Imsouane, van life in New Zealand, and the tangled beauty of human connection. Her friend, an exchange student from Canada, joined us without ceremony, slipping into the conversation as if she’d always been there. We traded poems and film projects, gasped at coincidences, laughed like we’d known each other longer than an hour. By the time my coffee was gone, I had written nothing - yet gained the kind of friends who say, We should take a trip together, and might actually do it.
In fact, I’m reminded of this every day. Newly grounded in this city, living with my best friends - one I hiked the Albanian Alps and road-tripped through California with, another I climbed a volcano and trekked to Machu Picchu alongside, and one who I was lucky enough to meet just here.
This is the magic: connection that happens rarely, yet often; in the stillness of being home or the motion of travel. The stars align, the butterfly effect plays out - and whether you’re looking for it or not, it finds you. And when it does, it’s easy.
The Subtle Bravery of Saying Hello
Day by day, solo travel becomes a quiet kind of social training. It’s coming out of your shell in micro-doses; the small bravery of starting a conversation, asking to join a table or saying yes to a spur-of-the-moment invitation. At home, we’re cushioned by routine - familiar faces, familiar places. But on the road, each day starts from scratch. No matter how shy you may be, it is inevitable that you will take small leaps toward saying hello.
You quickly learn the art of reading people. The first few times might feel like awkwardly knocking on a stranger’s door, but with practice, you begin to notice the signs - open body language, gazes that beckon you closer, a tone that says, Yes, I’d love to talk. You realise that rejection doesn’t sting as much as you feared, and there’s beauty in trying again when it doesn’t click. You also learn that not every person or moment is worth the effort - but when the energy feels right, intuition will draw you in.
Eventually, you learn to talk to people from every walk of life - from the sharp twelve-year-old Vietnamese shopkeeper, to the ninety-year-old Hispanic woman knitting alpaca wool on the sidewalk, to the middle-aged divorcee on his midlife-crisis Everest expedition. You realise that someone in their later thirties isn’t all too different to one in their early twenties - because we’re all just trying life out for the first time. And you gather more fruits coming out of these conversations than you ever did with a friend from school.
Conversations can start anywhere: over a shared stove in a hostel kitchen, beside a campsite sink while brushing your teeth, or from an accidental shoulder bump. Making the first move will reward you internally - look past the awkwardness and step boldly outside your comfort zone. Courage doesn’t always look like cliff-diving or crossing continents. Sometimes, it’s simply saying hello.
And with each hello, the next one gets easier.
Finding Your Kindred Spirits
If you have found your people at home, imagine how many more versions of your people are out there, waiting to be collected. Like-minded doesn’t mean identical - you can meet people from wildly different backgrounds and upbringings, yet still share the same values, pace, or passions. You’ll cross paths with fellow hikers on mountain trails, creatives in art galleries, and the life of the party in hostel bars.
Before travelling, I wasn’t entirely sure who “my people” were. I had friends that I loved back home, but never felt deeply tied to any community. It was through travel that I discovered both my passions and the kindred spirits who shared them. I fell in love with summiting mountains and surfing waves, dancing in small-town squares, and ending up in the most remote, off-the-grid places - the kind with just one main hostel and little else. Yet those hostels were often the warmest, most welcoming and homey places, as if the universe had handpicked all the right souls and tucked them neatly into the same carton. And the magic is - you’ll meet these like-minded spirits again and again, whether by plan or chance. The odds are high that they will return into your life like recurring characters in a TV series.
My dear German friend once told me a phrase I now carry everywhere:
Man sieht sich immer zweimal im Leben - “you always meet twice in life.”
Time and again, it’s proven true.
One friend I met in a notorious Montenegrin hostel became my van partner for Iceland’s ring road the following year. Another friend, whose hiking advice for Georgia’s mountains kept us in touch, met me again six months later in Madrid. A stranger who said hello across balconies in Rome, also toured me around his hometown of Lucerne. I played passenger princess down through Canada’s West with a buddy I previously partied with in Spain. And the mate from early surfing days in Morocco, well I later shared a surreal mushroom experience with him on a Colombian mountaintop.
These are all real stories of paths crossing, again and again - with no more effort than simply trusting the process.
Someone once told me, “If they ask about your star sign, they’re worth hanging around.” I’m not particularly spiritual, nor have I ever seriously read a daily horoscope. But I can vouch for this advice - because these are the people who believe in fate. They trust the present process. They believe there’s a reason for your happening and they (like you) are here to see where it flows.
Connection Beyond Tourist Trails
There is something deeply humbling about stepping on foreign ground, befriending the locals and being invited into someone else’s home. This kind of cultural immersion can’t be found in typical guidebooks - instead it’s captured through words similar to Anthony Bourdain’s: “The best way to understand a culture is to sit down and eat with the people who live it.”
Imagine being welcomed into a home far from everything familiar, like a quiet village in Nepal or the rolling hills of the Swiss countryside. The scent of spices, the warmth of shared laughter, stories told in languages barely understood, and the simple ritual of breaking bread together.
Earlier this year, I was invited to a village homestay with a Sri Lankan family. Their simple acts of hospitality made me feel seen, safe, and part of something bigger than myself. I encountered cultural immersion unlike anything before - cooking dishes passed down through generations, dancing along to songs in a language I could not understand, learning about sacred plantations and religious rituals with strangers who offered nothing but pure kindness.
Often, hospitality is a bridge - a silent language that dissolves barriers of distance. No matter how far I travel, or how vast the language gap, compassion and shared humanity remain universal. It’s in these open-door moments that any place can feel like home - and those people like family.
The Power of Talk
Real conversation. Isn’t this the whole point? To hear and to be heard. The beautiful collision of worlds.
Real conversation. Life after death. Parallel universes. The silly concept of marriage and other adulting nonsense. How loneliness can really eat you. If you want children one day. The privilege of our everyday freedom while half the world is trapped in war. How we are all romantics, deep down. Generational trauma - in fact all of our darkest traumas in life. The one meal you could happily eat to death. Your superpower pick (to speak every single language fluently is mine). Where the craziest place you’ve ever had sex was. The fear of regretting. The greatest sunset you have ever seen. And simply being lost - having no idea about anything, anything except this unspoken feeling right now: this little flame between you and me, and just keeping it alive.
This is the conversation you meet again and again, over coffee and cigarettes. The kind that never grows old. Knowing a stranger’s story better than their name, you both wander down a tangent of secrets and buried thoughts - drawn out for no reason other than the safe, trusting aura that circles in the air.
This intensifies the more time is limited. You will meet people for ten minutes to three days to two weeks - aware there’s an expiry date. Yet often, the shortest lived moments are also the deepest explored. That’s the connection.
My advice? Talk to everyone - the local baker, the hippy hostel owner, the old woman on the bus. Even if there are barely any words to exchange, smile, nod, offer a snack. These little gestures - often neglected at home - seem to come easier when we are travelling. You have nothing to lose, except a cool story you’ll never know, had you not taken that small leap.
Each tiny seep of light opens for more sunshine into the world.
The Deeper Layer: Why It All Matters
When I first set out, I wasn’t chasing new friendships or seeking human bonds. I thought inspiration would come from breathtaking landscapes and fascinating landmarks - and while they did leave their mark, it was, in the end, always about the people.
Long stretches of solitude made me crave real connection - not the surface-level small talk, but the deeply rooted conversations and shared energy that lingers long after parting ways. The kind of fire that makes you feel alive. New born relationships are adventures in themselves, sometimes the most intense or thrilling kind. They can feel like rollercoasters of infatuation, ecstasy or melancholy - but always form a story worth telling.
A British friend once mentioned, as we wandered through the streets of Madeira, how pigeons used to serve as postmen for humans in the past - perhaps this explains why so many still roam big cities like New York today. They strut confidently (sometimes too much) among us, as if some faint attachment still lingers. “A little birdie once told me” might resonate with life messages we humans also send each other.
If birds are drawn to us strangers, maybe it’s only natural that we seek comfort from other beings too. The same way we reach for connection with Mother Nature herself - the very reason I’m on my way to the mountains as I write this.
Connection breathes meaning into our existence - the very heart of existential philosophy.
I like to think of it as a mosaic of perspectives - each person I’ve met adding a piece to my worldview, gently shifting how I see life. Advice from one friend might guide my next destination; the energy from another helps me savour small pleasures - like that perfect moment of fare la scarpetta (bread scraping the last bits of sauce from the bowl) or timing “Space Song” by Beach House to start exactly at 0:26 during takeoff. A pack of cards is an essential travel companion, and thanks to some European friends, I’ve become instinctively wired to lock eyes with everyone I cheers a drink with (as I refuse to accept seven years of bad sex).
We absorb the people we cherish. We send little telepathic notes without realising, until we miss them. One friend taught me to say three gratitudes and one manifestation out loud each day - a practice I’ve since passed on to countless other travellers. Another friend inspired my collection of riddles and “would you rather” questions, which I love to toss out on long hikes, in surfing lineups, or over a meal - partly for the fun of watching strangers wrestle with answers, and partly to see sparks fly. There is nothing more satisfying than observing complete wholesome energy between a group of humans simply existing together in one place.
And when it ends? The “goodbye” becomes “thank you.”
Thank you for meeting me. For letting me learn through you. For being part of that chapter.
You physically part ways, but they don’t really leave. You will find them - in your songs and playlists, your photographs and words, the books that you read, the way you make your breakfast, and the memories you carry.
For me, I keep a journal where I ask every special person from my journey to write a little something - a word, quote, letter, or a sketch. It’s my way of holding onto a piece of them for the rest of my life. A way to cherish and reminisce. To me, it’s the most valuable travel souvenir I could ever collect.
Connections - platonic, romantic or some place in-between - come in waves.
Sometimes, the same wave finds you again, somewhere else in the ocean. Our lives are these oceans - wide and full of unexpected currents.
To the incredible souls who inspired these words - I am deeply grateful to have met you, and look forward to when our paths intertwine again. And to those connections yet unknown - you will find me waiting where stories begin and journeys never truly end.