There are a few reasons why I love travelling alone. There is the obvious reason – the fluidity of unplanned, solo travel often thrusts the freedom to enjoy immersive travel experiences in my hand. The second reason is that it gives me the opportunity to interact with and get to know strangers, and perhaps build friendships with them.
That’s not to mention that I make lifelong friends by talking to strangers on my travels. I haven’t. But these interactions have undeniably made my day better, even if it means only marginally.
One of the fondest memories I have of talking to strangers is while travelling in the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Since it was a short lay over, I did not want to spend money on a data plan. I got by with free WiFi but decided to use a map to get around in the city. The result? I got lost and became disoriented but I did not hesitate to ask for directions. (Full disclosure: sometimes I get lost even with the spoon-feeding level help provided by Google maps.)
What followed was that I was immediately surrounded by enthusiastic locals, breaking their busy morning routines, trying to help me to get to my destination, without the binding limits of a common language. A picture of that morning, of me with an open map in hand, surrounded by locals, taken by my friend who travelled with me, still survives in the depths of my hard drive and brings back memories of that cloudy morning in Ulaanbaatar. That incident coloured my perception about Mongolians as a friendly bunch and further cemented it in my travels in the country.
“Talking to strangers is a profound experience,” says author Kio Stark whose book When Strangers Meet propagates the theory of interacting with strangers. But we aren’t entirely comfortable doing that even in our neighbourhoods, much less while travelling. We are not to blame entirely. “The really sad thing is that in many parts of the world we’re raised to believe that strangers are dangerous by default. That we can’t trust them, that they might hurt us,” says Stark.
Stark emphasises that most strangers aren’t dangerous. “We’re uneasy around them because we have no context and we don’t know what their intentions are. So instead of using our perceptions and making choices, we rely on this category of stranger .”
According to Stark, when you talk to strangers, you are making unexpected connections. And I can vouch for that.
On an early-summer morning in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, I met a stranger. I was digging into a plate of string hoppers with dal curry when a girl entered the restaurant filled with locals getting their morning grub before rushing for work.
Though with curiosity in her eyes but shackled by the language barrier, she stood out like a guppy in a koi pond. A Chinese Australian oncologist, she had ventured into a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, to taste the local breakfast. Now, she didn’t know what to order and, much worse, how to eat her order. I smiled at her and she immediately scooted next to me at my table.
During the course of our hearty breakfast, we discovered our day had no major plans except playing it by ear. We decided to rent a bike and visit the otherwise inaccessible beaches of the Northern Sri Lankan peninsula. Over the day, we rode around unmanned roads to get to beaches and spent time exploring abandoned churches and dipped our toes in natural springs. On my own, I would never have visited these places. Thus, a conversation with a stranger paved way for an interesting friendship.
But make no mistake, not every stranger you meet during your travels will become your friend. Heck, some won’t even be friendly. “I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions,” says Stark. “It is good to be friendly and it is good to learn when not to be. But none of that means we have to be afraid.”
The writer is an independent journalist who lives in Stuttgart, Germany, and often writes stories that intersect food and travel
