Raw and immediate. When I first started traveling solo in the Philippines, everything was. I moved on instinct — hiring cabal-habal (motorcycle taxi) driver to take me to hidden beaches, tiny towns tucked away from any map, and waterfalls that felt like secrets. Group tours were for reasons only very necessary, like a writing assignment tethered to a deadline and a byline. I never wanted a choir with my journey. I wanted the solo pulse. My company was the road, its moods and mysteries. It made me feel special.

Then Vietnam taught me something deeper about movement. I didn’t just go places. I became them in motion. My boyfriend, now husband, taught me how to ride a scooter before Covid-19 happened. And with it, I unlocked the deeper veins of the country. I wasn’t a passenger anymore. I was the engine. I roamed to places most travelers skip — from Cao Bang City, five hours by motorbike from Hanoi, and further three hours into the sprawling wilderness of Ban Gioc waterfall, standing on the fragile silk of the Vietnam–China border river. I’d find villages, rice paddies, silent bends of water, all because I could choose the direction in the moment.

Once you know how to ride a scooter in Vietnam, the places you can reach are almost unlimited. I chased massive river systems, highland edges, remote islands, and nothing felt more like pure exploration than steering toward the unknown. Travel then was driven by pure curiosity of what lays ahead or beyond the tree-lined coast. I could go and stop. Anywhere. Anytime. This solo scooter adventures expands your lungs and loosens your fear.

But Europe changed my ways.

Here I don’t chase hidden roads with the same urge. I choose buses — Flixbus, trains, the cords of public transport that thread cities and countrysides together. I unpack when I arrive and pack only when I’m off again. I stopped treating one place as a one-night stand but rather a week-long affair. Or least three-nights. One place for three nights feels like a calm rhythm. Enough to slightly know what your immediate temporary neighborhood has for breakfast. And if I’m up for something new, I join group tours.

These tours are often big, about twenty people, although the online listen often says SMALL GROUP.. I’m usually the only solo traveler, usually the only non-white face in the cluster. At first, it felt like an alien thing — like my solo ways were odd relics in a sea of couples and families chatting over their coffees in organized lines at train stations. It can be awkward at first.

Then I stopped resisting what was. It is what it is.

Honestly, there’s a kind of grace in that acceptance. On a day trip boat tour in Ksamil last summer (August 2025), I met a French woman in her sixties traveling with her husband and adult daughter. We traded snippets of our lives — her home in France, how I ended up in Germany. There was another solo traveler from Switzerland, so we shared that unspoken bond of traveling alone in a group full of pairs and trios. And somewhere in that exchange — something as simple as shared stories in the sun. I found joy.

Another tour took me to Gjirokastër, where a crew of Turkish women sort of adopted me. They took endless photos of me, fussed over angles and smiles like I was one of their own. I remember laughing, the mountain breeze knitting connection between us without force.

Travel now isn’t about scrimping every peso or dong to survive a journey. Travel now, for me, is about short windows of getaway as a mom where every moment counts. I don’t mind spending a bit more to see the wonders that Europe holds — not because I’m comfortable, but because I want to feel the full breadth of being here. The adventure isn’t only in finding the destination anymore. It’s in moving from one place to the next with intention, with ease, with stories that ripple into the spaces I return to at night.

I used to believe that only the rugged, uncomfortable journeys held truth worth writing about. That the softness of comfort betrayed the purity of travel. But now I see that softness has its own textures. A comfortable journey isn’t lesser. It’s just honest in another way. You notice faces more than roads, you share laughs with strangers more than you chase sunsets alone, and you remember that travel isn’t only about finding beauty in the wild — it’s also about finding yourself in the quiet moments when the bus hums along and the world passes in easy scenes out the window.

Maybe young, naive Jona thought that only hardship could turn into story. But now I see even comfort has narrative power — rich, soft, and deep like a slow river you get to know over time.