how to be safe Traveling Alone as a Woman

most women are familiar with the experience of the overly friendly or sexually aggressive man. The difference when traveling is that you don’t know the lay of the land—­literally and figuratively—and this makes you more vulnerable. Let’s face it, safety concerns specific to women travelers are about protecting yourself from men.

Years later, the only way I could walk around the medina in Marrakech was to hire a male “guide,” whose job at its most essential was to keep all the other guys away from me. Sometimes, the aggression turns violent, as when my friend Lynn and I were shopping for fabric at the Marché St-Pierre in Paris, and a man slapped her hard across the face when she publicly cursed him for groping her breast.

Most of the advice women are given for staying safe abroad suggests making themselves as small and unremarkable as possible—less visible, less independent, less expressive. Make like prey and try to escape attention. In a bid to be inconspicuous as they travel, women adjust their behavior, habits, appearance, and choices, creating rules of the road that are as varied as the women making them.

I have rules of my own. When I arrive in a major city where I don’t speak the language, I arrange to be met by a car to take me where I’m going. Unless I know a place well, I avoid walking around solo late at night.
But the sad thing about trying to be invisible or to hide inside a cocoon when you travel is that the more open, curious, and willing to connect you are, the bigger the travel payoff.
So I find myself breaking the rules. For me, one of the best ways to have meandering, free-form conversations with people I wouldn’t otherwise get to meet is to pick up hitchhikers. Some people think that’s crazy, but to me, it feels pretty safe. Local hitchhikers are willing to chat, give recommendations, or elucidate their point of view on all manner of subjects: politics both local and international, family and faith, food and cultural traditions. To have this pleasure, I have to trust my judgment; and confidence comes with age and experience. Yet none of us is given any guarantees.
Attention to safety is different from capitulating to fear. Most of the time, things are fine. Being aware of predatory or angry or contemptuous men is something I can no more avoid than the realization that most of the people I meet on my travels are as infinitely kind as they are fascinating.