Solo la penumbra me acompaña hoy

Solo travel is lonely for most parts. I am confined to single-serve dishes because I can only eat so much and I have no one to drink the cheap beer with in the evenings. There are no idle or meaningful conversations to while away the time, no one to make a better decision for me and no one to have a moment with. Travel is not solely about experiencing new environments and cultures but it is also about that shared experience, which adds much meaning to the travel itself. This was absent for me in Cambodia aside from the conversation I had on the roof of the boat from Battambang to Siem Reap. Perhaps Joseph Conrad put the whole mood most aptly in the account of his experience in the Congo in 1890:

"A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory...I wondered what I was doing there, for indeed it was only an unforeseen episode...Still the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there."

I did ask myself that all important question, "what the hell am I doing here?", a couple of times when I was lying in bed unable to sleep in the windowless guesthouse room where the fan only blew stale hot air that smelled of cigarette smoke and when I was showering in a cramped toilet whilst trying not to get my clothes wet. And then I chanted to myself that old mantra: it builds character, it builds character, it builds character, it builds...

The language barrier also often isolates and paralyzes one in an alien culture, there was just me, in my head, talking to myself. I actually felt more comfortable roaming about in Ecuador, where I could read the signs and talk to the locals, than in Cambodia, where it was pretty much looking for English menus and for locals who could speak English or Chinese. And then there was the thinking. Too much idle thinking. Thinking over a beer, thinking as I sat on the top of an ancient temple trying to kill time, thinking on the bus and thinking as I lay in bed too early to sleep. You know what they say about an idle mind.

"We live, as we dream, alone," writes Conrad in Heart of Darkness. I once subscribed to this whole notion, now I'd like to think otherwise.

And yes, photos with nobody in them.