Travel and Photography | Why I Don’t Travel Alone?

© 2012 Nepal | Behind The Scene | Photograph of Me at Nepal Taken By Ahmad Shukri

People travel for all kind of a reason, some do it because of their nature of work, they need to travel all over the world in order to fulfil their job specs. Some travel for leisure like a tourist. Some people like to visit modern country where there is modern buildings and great architecture. Some looking for more adventurous endeavour like trekking or climbing a mountain.

First and foremost, I’m not really a travel photographer but I’m a photographer who like to travel. Travel photographers usually sell their travel pictures or they get paid to photograph certain countries for an official assignment, well known travel photographers is like those who are working as photographer at National Geographic.

Other than traveling for an official assignment for my department, I like to travel with my friends all over the world. I’m not really into stock photography or wanted to write an article about my traveling to a magazine, I’m a casual traveler who also happen to be someone who like to take a picture and I like to be in the picture as well.

I’m not going into debate whether you should travel alone or with a friends, it is totally up to you. I’ve yet traveling alone, one of the reason is that, I need someone to take a photograph of me while I’m traveling, and I wanted it to be properly well taken, as you already know, photographers are too particular about how their photograph should be taken. I’d an experience where I let some strangers take picture of me and most of the times, their composition is out, no matter how well I give the instruction, it never satisfied me. So I need someone who have a little bit knowledge of photography to travel with me.

The other thing is about safety. “There’s safety in numbers…” as the saying goes. Most of the times when traveling I bring along a DSLR camera, it is not top of the line camera but I need someone to watch my back and I watch their back. I like to travel to some remote area sometimes like in the Himalaya, to a crowded place of New Delhi and to a conflict area like Kashmir. If I were traveling with only a cheap compact camera, with very little sophisticated gadget, then maybe I don’t need a friend traveling with me.

But then again, whether you need to travel alone because you can’t find a friends who can travel with you, then you need to do some kind of research on which country is safe for solo travellers like Japan or South Korea for an instance and most developed country are quite safe for solo traveler.

One thing that most people should never forget is that, normally those so called solo traveler have already making some friends with someone in the country they plan to visit, so that, they have someone who can show them around, there are various online traveler forum where you can meet a new friends who share the same dream as you and who wanted to travel to the same country and looking for a companion.

Just make sure that you have make through research about someone background before you contact them, make sure you know about their family and friends, you don’t want some stranger  to take advantage of you, and then let someone knows about it, your family knows who and where you will be spending time with in a foreign land.

The other thing is about cost, actually traveling with friends will save your money quite a lot. Normally a double bed room and a single room in a hotel doesn’t differ so much so if you travel with friends, you can split the budget. You can also save cost when sharing taxis or auto-rickshaw in India for an example. If you plan to take a Shikara in Kashmir, you can also split the bill. Another example is, if you plan to travel on a return trip to Sonamarg from Srinagar, you paid for one vehicle, so if you travel with four person, the cost of traveling will be greatly reduced. Return trip to Sonamarg from Srinagar is Indian Rupee Rs2100 or approximately USD34 per vehicle, if you travel alone you have to pay that amount in full by yourself and if you travel with four person you can split the cost.

I think cost factor alone will make you think twice whether you wanted to travel alone or not, unless you are very rich and wanted to travel comfortably, wanted to have the vehicle completely to yourself, then why bother reading this blog post in the first place. You can travel alone from one country after another but it will be good if there is someone there waiting for you.