Lone Travellers - you can see the world!

Having reached 30 and just coming out of a long-term relationship I
was forced to reassess my life and see what I'd achieved and what I
wanted to achieve. I had made good progress in my career and was
comfortably off, I had a house plenty of good friends. OK I was now
single but there were lots of things I wanted to do, one of which was
to see something of the world, particularly the ancient world. I've
spent most of my life reading about the pyramids in Egypt, the Inca
temples in South America, the temples at Angkor Wat but I'd never seen
any of them. I was bemoaning this fact to one of my friends one day
when she turned round and said "So what's stopping you from going?"
This made me think - what was stopping me? I had enough money to go, I
got several weeks holiday at work. The only thing stopping me was
having nobody to travel with, and travelling to any of these people as
a lone female didn't seem sensible or desirable.
A little while after this I was talking to a colleague at work and she
told me she'd been travelling for several years with a company called
Explore. They specialise in holidays to off the beaten track
destinations for independent travellers. You join a group of other like
minded people and see the real country not just the package
hotels.
She lent me a brochure and I was hooked, the difficult part was picking
one holiday out of the hundreds that seemed so fantastic! I eventually
decided to book the "Nile Felucca" trip&;#8230;I couldn't quite
believe it, I was actually going to Egypt!
I was very nervous as the date of the trip approached, this was a big
step going on holiday on my own, most of my friends and family were
full of admiration for my bravery (or amazed at my foolishness, I'm not
sure which!). My parents took me to the airport and as I queued for
check-in a chap with an Explore tag on his bags started talking to me,
and we discovered we were headed for the same trip.
Arriving in Cairo airport we found our rep and met up with the rest of
the group I started chatting to a girl on the bus and we discovered we
were both accountants (oh no) and we ended up sharing a room at the
hotel that night. This is a feature of Explore holidays, you don't pay
single supplements but you share with another member of the group,
which means you immediately meet at least one person. Some people might
be put off by this but I've shared with some great people and everyone
on a trip of this sort is going to be of a similar personality or they
wouldn't be on that sort of trip.
Our first day in Egypt we set off early in the morning through the city
heading for the pyramids, as we caught our first sight I was completely
speechless and a little choked. I seemed to have been waiting my whole
life for this and now here I was. A few weeks before I'd been watching
a tv programme about Egypt and it had suddenly hit me that I would be
standing there soon, and now here I was. It was magical. And I never
thought I would have been doing it on my own, this trip was as much
about learning about myself as learning about Egypt.
I'll write more about the trip itself soon but this article was
intended to let anyone who is a "lone traveller", or who wants to be,
that there are ways of travelling that aren't package holidays but with
the safety of a group and a leader.
If you're interested visit the Explore website http://www.explore.co.uk
they also have companies that operate in the US, Australia, New
Zealand, Canada&;#8230;.and on the trips I've been on there has
always been a mix of people from those countries (and others) which is
another feature of Explore holidays - you don't just learn about the
culture of the country you're visiting but also about the culture of
your fellow travellers.