The Suitcase Sound Nobody Warns You About
There’s a specific sound a suitcase makes when you zip it shut the night before a solo trip. Nobody warns you about it. It’s not dramatic — just a small, final click — but at two in the morning, lying awake for no good reason, that click can sound less like the start of an adventure and more like a door shutting behind you.
If you’ve ever lain there at 2am typing “is Udaipur safe for solo female travelers” into your phone for the fourth time, or refreshing your hotel confirmation to see it’s still there, or already dreading the moment a waiter looks at your table and asks “just one?” — congratulations, you’re not broken. You’re just about to do something you haven’t done before, and 2am has a nasty habit of making unfamiliar things look enormous.
Here’s the thing nobody puts in the reels: solo travel is not a highlight reel. There will be a wrong turn down a lane that looked promising and wasn’t. There will be ten genuinely awkward minutes at a restaurant table built for two, occupied by one. You might land, exhausted, and briefly wonder what possessed you to book this in the first place.
And then something small will happen. You’ll ask a question in broken Hindi and someone will understand you anyway. You’ll find the hotel without the map app. You’ll order without hesitating. You’ll handle it — not heroically, just quietly — and that’s usually where the trip actually starts.
The nervous feeling is not a warning sign
There’s a difference between your gut telling you something is genuinely wrong, and your brain doing its favourite party trick: turning “I’ve never done this” into a slideshow of everything that could possibly go sideways. Listen to the first one. Politely ignore the second.
You don’t need to arrive at the airport feeling brave. You’re allowed to be nervous and go anyway — honestly, that might be the more honest version of what courage actually looks like, rather than the fearless version we’re sold.
Practice being alone first
I like this trick, and I’ve used it myself before a trip I was dreading slightly more than I admitted to anyone: pick a random Friday, go to a restaurant in your own city, alone, phone face-down, no book as a shield. Order the thing you actually want, not the thing that’s easy to eat while distracted.
The first five minutes will feel like everyone’s watching you. They’re not. The couple two tables over is deep in their own argument about whose turn it is to call their landlord. Someone’s photographing their pasta for reasons that are entirely their business. Nobody has clocked the fact that you’re alone, because nobody is thinking about you at all — which, weirdly, is the most freeing realisation of the whole exercise.
Do that once at home, and the first solo dinner in a new city stop being a big moment. It’s just dinner.
Udaipur isn’t the postcard
Yes, fine — the lake, the palace floating in it, the rooftop sunsets that look faked but aren’t. That version of Udaipur is real and it is beautiful and Instagram hasn’t lied to you about that part.
But the city gets more interesting the second you stop trying to photograph it. The Old City has lanes where you’ll end up walking behind a scooter, a cow, and a man carrying what looks like an entire hardware store balanced on his head, all at the same time, none of them in a hurry. Inside a shopkeeper will call you in to see “just one thing,” and you’ll leave forty minutes later having bought nothing and somehow feeling like you got the better end of the deal. Suddenly a temple bell will cut clean through traffic noise at some random hour and briefly rearrange your whole afternoon. Meanwhile a rooftop that looked flat and sleepy in a photo at noon turns into something completely different by four o’clock, when the light starts doing what light does over water.
That’s the Udaipur worth noticing. Not the filtered one.
Where to stay is really a feelings question
Nobody can hand you the “correct” neighbourhood — Old City for atmosphere, lakeside for calm, somewhere further out if you want more room to breathe — because the right answer depends entirely on how a place feels when you picture arriving there by yourself, tired, bag in hand. Skip the question “which room photographs best” and ask instead: would I actually want to walk back here alone tonight?
Handling the “Table for One” Moment
You will, at some point, stand at a restaurant door and be asked how many. You’ll say one, and it will feel, for exactly one second, like you’ve announced something to the room. You haven’t. Sit down. Order. Nobody’s counting.
And if dinner-for-one feels like too much on night one, that’s fine — try it at breakfast instead, when it’s somehow always easier.
You don’t have to earn the empty afternoons
This might be the actual point of the whole trip: an afternoon spent sitting by the lake doing absolutely nothing productive isn’t a wasted afternoon. It’s not a gap in the itinerary. It’s the itinerary. Udaipur has more than enough history and beauty to fill a week if you wanted it to — but it doesn’t demand that of you, and that’s rarer in a destination than it should be.
Before you close the suitcase
That zip still makes the same small, final sound. It probably always will. You close it anyway, and you land, and you find your room, and you step outside and see the city with your own eyes instead of someone else’s filtered version of it.
Somewhere between a cup of tea, a lane you didn’t mean to walk down, and a dinner for one that stopped feeling strange around the third bite, you land on something quietly obvious: you’re okay. You didn’t need the trip to change you into someone else. You just needed to know you could go somewhere unfamiliar, alone, and find your way there.
That’s a decent souvenir, honestly.
