The Moments that Changed How I Travel

As I was organizing my thoughts for this post, I knew I’d start with the hotel room in Cusco and then the hotel room in London. But once I started writing, I remembered two more: one from the first time I traveled to Europe without my parents, and one in India. That these have blended together in my memory with soft edges says something about how, as women, our baseline for safety is simply different from a man’s. It’s a fact of life that we’re targets.

I don’t want to dwell on that, because I don’t want this to be a downer. Rather, I want this post to be useful and help you feel prepared.

Seville

I traveled through Spain with my older sister the summer I graduated high school and she graduated college. It was a fun trip, full of laughs and the kind of memories you keep. Partway through, we fell in with a few other Americans, a woman and two men, and we all ended up in the same hostel in Seville (my first and last hostel experience), on the top floor. The floors were horseshoe shaped: stairs at one end, dead end at the other. Private rooms, shared bathroom.

The only other person on our floor was a young man staying alone in the room at the top of the stairs. He kept his door open and sat there. Sitting, and just staring out into the hall.

The room my sister and I shared was at the dead end. On our last night, our friends had already checked out and moved on to another city, so it was just the two of us. We came back from dinner and he was there in his doorway, watching the hallway. We moved past quickly, got ready for bed, and got in. The clock tower chimed eleven and, as if he’d been waiting for the cue, he knocked.

My breath stopped. Two women, top floor of an old building, dead end of the hall. The door suddenly felt very flimsy. There was no second lock on it. We were sitting ducks. My sister and I stared at each other while he knocked and explained, through the door, why he wanted to come in. About ten minutes later we finally heard him walk away. With shaking hands we packed our backpacks as silently and as fast as we could and practically ran out of the hostel. Neither of us calmed down until we were in a proper hotel across from the train station.

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