Years ago a Portuguese photographer who visited the four corners of this roundish world gave an interview to one of those weekend magazines that comes with a daily newspaper. He was saying that his best experiences as a traveller had always been when he was alone, so that he could plunge deeper into the places, the people he was visiting. I don’t know if what he didn’t say was related to having sex with the locals — who was that World War II German spy who could speak a given language with all its regionalisms after being locked with a native girl in a house for weeks? Is this story a memory error of mine?
I must agree with the argument in principle. If one is escorted by another person while travelling, more or less half of one’s attention is gone. Probably each member added to the party will divide the attention by itself. Besides one will form a nucleus of protection, a physical, linguistic, emotional one. Like the basic family unit.
Anyway, it has been my case. Even when travelling in company, the best absorption moments are those when I'm alone for a while. It reminds me of Andrej, a Russian hitchhiker who my brother decided to shelter for the night. You could see in his eyes the amount of information he was processing. You could feel his fear mixed with thankfulness when we drove him to Barcelona to take the train back home before his allowance time was spent, in which case he would be kept from returning to the Schengen space for five years. He was jumpy on the backseat of the car, reading every directions road sign. His jokes were edgy. The night set in but he couldn’t sleep. And then he finally breathed his distress out when the daybreak brought both light and the industrial outskirts of the Catalan capital.
Maybe it is just a case of asking oneself, do you want to have a shieldless travelling experience or do you want to share the experience in loco?
