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The driver took my backpack from the roof of the van and set it on the sidewalk against the pink-tiled doorway. To get it I would have had to step up about 2 feet from the street, impossible with my injured back. I asked a sweet young thing with a mass of blonde curls, wearing a strappy tank top and flip-flops, to hand it to me. She rolled her eyes. And walked away.
***
What I found difficult to accept was my fragility. It was one thing to need help with directions after getting lost. It was something totally different to need help after getting hurt.
When I planned my trip, I hoped to prove I could still do solo travel, that I wasn’t dependent on others for adventure. And maybe, I wanted to feel invincible again. After the end of my marriage cut so deeply, I wanted to feel the same invulnerability of my twenties. But I had never really traveled all by myself.
The gift of traveling alone had been discovering the help and company of strangers who became friends, if only for a short time. The taxi driver who became a tour guide at the salt pans in Las Salinas, Peru and his neighbors who gave me my first taste of quinoa. David who’d shared his water with me on the way up Huayna Picchu that towers behind Macchu Picchu. Alicia, whom I met in a restaurant in Merida. She and I were stranded together at some Mayan ruins outside the city and had been given a ride back to our hotel by a family in a pickup. On this trip, I’d been nurse to a young man riding his motorcycle from Texas to the tip of Argentina. His leg was all chewed up by asphalt and gravel after a bad spill. I helped him apply Neosporin and urged him to go to a clinic. I’m a part of his story as much as the Australian nurse was a part of mine.
Needing other people didn’t mean I’d failed at life as a single person. There’s no shame in asking for help. The only way to never need anyone else is to never go anywhere or do anything, and that simply isn’t acceptable. Traveling alone, in life or on a trip, doesn’t mean flying solo.