The biggest decision that you will have to make about your trip is not where to go, or for how long to go. It’s with whom you will go.
Your options are – go with your friend or friends, go with a special someone, or go alone. I’m not including traveling with parents here – there’s probably a whole book for that somewhere, and it was not written by me. So let’s talk about these choices.
If you are a true backpacker, you will never hesitate to go anywhere alone. This is one of the most important things I can actually tell you in this whole blog. It is especially true for you, my dear female readers. I know, it sounds scary at first. And don’t get me wrong – it can be, especially when you go to a new place for the first time and don’t speak the language. But remember, you can wait and wait for years using the excuse of not wanting to go somewhere alone while your so-called friends come up with their own busy excuses why they cannot be adventurous. Is that really the people you want to travel with? Of course, it’s different if you have a boyfriend or a husband, in which case, by all means, take him along as I will explain in a separate post about traveling with the special someone.
Let’s say, you do have spontaneous, easy-going friends and you can actually organize a trip together with them. Going on a long trip with friends can seem like the best way to go, and it’s probably going to happen on your first couple of backpacking trips. After all, what better way to experience an exciting foreign land than with a group of people you already know and trust? You have shared a few things in life so far, so why not share a few more, and have stories to last a lifetime?
Sure, traveling with friends has its obvious benefits. You will always have a safety cushion, any negative experiences will likely be played down and laughed about, and you don’t have to make all the decisions – in an ideal world, you will always have consensus on what to do and where to go next.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. Someone from your group will have to be a leader, at least for all the travel planning and logistics. You cannot all just say, “I don’t care, wherever y’all wanna go is fine”, because then nobody will end up doing anything. You would have turned into a herd of cats with no direction or plan.
And then, it’s very possible that you, a driven, prepared backpacker, would have to become that leader. But guess what: leaders are not always liked. Sometimes other members of your company might become passive-aggressive about it, especially if you have a mixed male-female group, or people would suddenly acquire their own plans, different from yours. Some of your group members might be what I call “Faux-chill” type and you had no idea, because all you did together prior to your trip was having beers together in your home town. They are the ones acting all cool and relaxed, but at the slightest argument or tension, they blow up. So now, in addition to making the plan for everyone, you have a headache of a possibly deteriorating dynamic within your group.
Similarly, it is not always easy to be the follower. A lot of people are fine with following someone until… they decide they do not want to do it anymore, even if it’s something everybody in the group is doing. They might prefer to spend hours taking pictures at some market while you’re on your way to the beach.
You see where I am going with this? On paper, traveling with friends may sound like a great idea, but the reality might be quite different. You might not see or do nearly as much as you would on your own, because not everybody is up for everything you’d want to do and vice versa. You might be up for a sunrise hike in Rio, but your two best mates really want to check out this club on Ipanema, and you don’t want to be a party pooper so you come along, but as you return back to your hostel at 4 am, drunk and exhausted, there’s no way you can even get out of bed until noon.
The moral of the story – if you go with a group, make sure it’s a) manageable size, I would say, no more than 4, and b) you all agree on the plan of your trip beforehand, so that there are no conflicts of interest later on. It really helps if you know everybody in the group really well – in other words, if you go with the group, make sure it’s your best friends.
If you go with just one friend, everything above applies, too, except if your journey goes pear-shaped, then likely so will the friendship, and you won’t even have the group dynamic to diffuse whatever tension you have built up over travel disagreements.
Therefore, I again recommend going alone to most destinations. After all, you will always meet new people on the road and make temporary travel companions just about anywhere you’ll go.