05/29/23
On my long solo trips abroad, I pick a base in one spot and take side trips from there. I leave my stuff behind and go back after every trip. I did it this way in Catania (Sicily), Mexico City, and now in Chiang Mai, a medium-sized city of about 1.2 million people in the northern mountains of Thailand.
I stay at a “coliving” (pictured right) – a dwelling that includes living and working spaces for solo travelers doing their jobs remotely (aka “digital nomads"). Colivings have not only everything you need to live and work comfortably but they also come with an instant community (See below).
Since I’ve been here, I’ve done side trips to Mae Kampong, a small village about a 2-hour drive north of here; to Koh Samui, an island in the southern Gulf of Thailand about a 2-hour flight from here; and to Singapore, a 3-hour flight. After each trip, I’ve come back to Chiang Mai. This weekend, I’ll leave for the last time and head to Bangkok.
I do it for practical reasons and also for some more abstract ones that explain why I love this style of travel so much.
Packing up and moving every single week for several months; carrying all of my things with me; getting settled into a new place and getting the lay of the land; finding a suitable place to work that is comfortable, quiet, has reliable wifi and is not a stuffy hotel room – all of that is a total time suck and will completely burn you out.
I can take trips to new and exciting places every weekend and enjoy a slower pace in an increasingly familiar place during the week.
But there’s so much more to it than this.
Today, I came back to Chiang Mai after a 3-night trip to Singapore. It was mid-afternoon and the co-working space, which you have to walk through to get to the bedrooms upstairs, was at peak capacity. As soon as I dragged my carry-on through the door, AP (below) – a cool, young Thai woman who works at the front desk – jumped out of her seat and rushed over to hug me.
“You’re back!” she said. “I missed you!”
What a gift to be “all by myself” nearly halfway around the globe and to have just one person to welcome me back when I walk through the front door; just one person to notice I’m gone, miss me and care that I'm back. That wouldn’t happen if I just kept traveling from A to B to C. Every departure would be a goodbye.
And it’s not just one person – There's the lady I buy my coffee from every morning (below with her husband). When I showed back up at her shop after 4 days away earlier this month, she clapped her hands together in front of her face and said, “Susan! I thought you left!” (Sure, that’s not my name, but for a welcome like that, I'll lean in.)
One part of my routine has been daily tai chi and qigong classes at a studio about a 10-minute walk from where I’m staying. On the way to class one day, I stopped into a pharmacy for sunscreen and shampoo. The pharmacist has greeted me every time I've passed since then.
In the second week of class, I met Neta, a solo traveler from Israel. We hit it off as soon as we started chatting that first day. Sure, we might have had a nice conversation if I had just seen her once and then never again. But we ended up having lunch together every day after class. She had just come from Vietnam, where I am headed next. She gave me all kinds of intel that prompted me to make major changes to my itinerary. And she’s joining me on a 3-day trip to Cambodia early next month!
I connected with Priya, a solo traveler from India, through a Facebook group for female digital nomads where we learned we’d be in Chiang Mai at the same time. She was diligent about meeting up once we got here. Together, we agreed the nearby jazz club was going to be our spot during our time here. For the two weeks that we overlapped, she was the friend that I could text to say, “Want to get dinner tomorrow?” – the kind of friend you really miss having when you’re traveling on your own, never stopping for more than a few days in each place.
Claire, an Atlanta native, has taught at an international school here in Chiang Mai for about five years. A mutual friend in Atlanta connected us. I thought she might just get together with me once to be nice, but after that first dinner, she mentioned other places she wanted to show me the next time we got together. She’s been the friend that I can text with questions about Chiang Mai. And, because I also taught abroad for a few years after college and, like her, picked up the language in my chosen country with relative ease, we have so much in common and so much to talk about.
Brayden moved into the coliving about a week after I did. I saw him come in, but he didn’t see me. Later that night, I was sitting by myself at a restaurant nearby and he walked in by himself. I said, “Are you Brayden? I’m staying at the same place as you.” A New Yorker, he reminds me of so many of my friends from college. He feels familiar.
These relationships came from three weeks in Chiang Mai. And none came at the cost of seeing new places or experiencing new things. I’m not experiencing less because I’ve decided to stay longer in one place. Sure, if I were to plan a perfectly linear trip, and spend each week in a different place as I propel myself forward across SE Asia, I would see a greater number of new places. But living in one place in Thailand (and then another next month in Vietnam) for several weeks is pretty new, too. When, on a week’s vacation, do you get the opportunity to learn what it might be like to live there? To learn the rhythms and routines of the place?
I see all the main attractions in every place I visit, but I also get to see the monks in orange robes set out with giant silver bowls every morning to collect food donations from local shops; teenage girls in school uniforms race home on motor scooters every afternoon; the old folks at the bodega next door sit down for dinner together at a table on the sidewalk every night.
And I get to see people who are happy to see me.
