The other night in Gili Air, I was looking for wifi to cancel my flight (again). My flight was supposed to take off…in a few hours from now actually. I stomped onto the beaches of multiple restaurants demanding the code and stomped out. In one particular restaurant – Chillout Bungalows – I went for the multiple-entry stomping.

Suddenly, I heard, “Excuse me.” I looked up and saw a laid-back-looking blonde guy. I had noticed him looking at me with bemusement the last few times I had stomped onto the beach to decipher the piece of paper handed to me by the waiter and type in the “username” and “password” fields. Hands up in air! How the F is anyone supposed to understand these instructions????????

“Thank god!” I thought. “This guy knows the wifi password.”

“Are you traveling alone?” he asked.
“Yes.” (What’s your point? Can’t you see that I have something I’m clearly trying to do? Am I stomping from relaxation here?)
“Are you staying at Omah Gili? I saw you there.”
Oh! Yes, I did recognize him! Just not with his shirt on.
“Well, I’m also traveling alone, and the one thing I don’t like is eating alone. Would you like to have dinner tomorrow night?”
We chatted a bit and agreed to meet at the hotel at 7pm. He advised me on some wifi spots, and I left him with a puddle of his melted ice cream dessert.

I couldn’t relate to the feeling. I love eating by myself! I suppose it’s from all the business travel and being able to have a moment of peace, especially nights when you can avoid the business dinners and just be yourself in a quiet mental processing space for a few hours.

Traveling alone is a very specific kind of trip. I’ve backpacked around Colombia, China, hiked U.S. National Parks, and tacked on trips on the end of business trips to Brazil, India, many U.S. cities, and other places.

Positives

1. You can do whatever you want at any given moment of the day. Set your own schedule and pace.
2. You have plenty of time to reflect. Stuff will come up subtly.
3. It can be supremely restful, especially if your normal life is very social, hectic, and oriented around the wants and needs of others.
4. If you’re open to it, you will meet all sorts of interesting people – similar and dissimilar to yourself – and make new friends. On this current trip, I’m not so open to it.

Negatives

1. Decisionmaking is all on you. It’s nice to get opinions from other people sometimes.
2. There’s no one to watch your bag while you go into the most disgusting dark (literally you can’t see anything) squatting toilets in places like suburban Chinese train stations (which in terms of population is bigger than any U.S. city). I feel sick thinking about it.
3. It’s nice to have someone to share it with, not necessarily in the moment, but so you can reflect back on it together in the future.
4. Being responsible for everything can get old from time to time.
5. It’s good to have other people to push you in a different direction or rely on each others skills. For example, I’m so over haggling that I don’t even bother anymore while some people love to get the best price. I’m content to have them organize the best deal. Or as another example, I definitely would have done more stuff this trip if I were with someone else. I’m personally content to stare of into the distance and do nothing.

In this particular instance of meeting new people, my Danish dinner companion and I had some core things in common. He had also had a serious corporate job that he left some years ago. When he first left his position as a finance manager in Denmark, he sailed around the Indian Ocean for 3 months visiting deserted and inhabited islands. He returned to another finance job for a large marketing company. Meanwhile, he started taking life coaching courses and figured out that his passion was for teaching. Now he’s a high school teacher at a school for students with disabilities, and it doesn’t feel like work – he is extremely happy. That is encouraging. We talked about how he transformed as a person and heavy topics around meditation, psychological issues, war and the world we live in. We sat under the stars at my favorite restaurant, tablecloth and candlelight, eating a seafood and veggie platter (extremely slowly), sipping white wine, and seeing the orange moon rise in the horizon beyond. We said goodnight and exchanged contact information so we could share some trip-planning intelligence, as he was heading to Canggu the next day to surf and relax.

The next night (my last night in Gili Air), I was content to go back to doing my own thing. I indulged in 3 dinners starting in the late afternoon after SCUBA, heading into sunset, and then at a bar with live music. I laughed and said “no thank you” when the bar owner offered me marijuana and mushrooms and didn’t even order a beer. For hours, I laid down on a bean bag by the waves looking up at the stars, singing along to the band, appreciating the moment of quietude and solitude. Occasionally, I would cut off pieces of my overdone tuna steak and throw it to the black cat meowing piteously (and LOUDLY) next to me while the couples and large groups surrounding me had their own moments and a bonfire was kindled a few feet away.