I was packing a crossbody bag that can’t be cut when it occurred to me that safety isn’t a checklist. I’ve been thinking about this as I prepare for a trip through Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka — four countries, over 20 saved items in TripIt, and a set of habits that have accumulated across years of travel. Vietnam a few years ago. Several countries in Asia. Living in India. Those experiences don’t make me invincible, but they do mean I move differently now, and it’s not because I got braver. It’s because I learned to pay attention earlier and to trust what I notice without turning it into drama.
What I want to talk about in this episode is what safety actually looks like when you’re a woman traveling alone. Not the advisory website version, and not the version where fear gets to make your decisions for you. The version that’s practical, contextual, and built from real experience.
In this episode:
- The TripIt safety score
- What the night in Morocco taught me
- What dusk does to a place
- Living in Sudan
- The danger of a single story
- Choosing where you feel resourced
- What hypervigilance looks like
“I don’t want women to feel ashamed for being cautious. Caution can come from experience and from care. It means you’re paying attention. I also don’t want caution to mean disappearing in your own life.” — Damianne
What does a safety score actually tell you?
When TripIt flagged Luang Prabang as high risk, I didn’t dismiss it immediately, but I also didn’t hand over my judgment. I read recent accounts. I talked to people who had been there recently. I looked at what was happening in border countries, because borders really do matter, and so does timing. A safety score is a prompt to look more closely, not a final answer. There’s a difference between those two things, and the gap between them is where your own judgment lives.
I’ve noticed that the women who say “I won’t go there, it’s not safe” are often collapsing an entire place into one headline or one warning, especially when the place being dismissed is somewhere I’ve actually been. I understand that impulse. I’ve also felt it. But I’ve seen how complex places get flattened by a single story, and I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s framing around the danger of that is as true for safety as it is for anything else.
What does dusk do to a place?
I remember arriving at night in Morocco with two friends. We got off the bus, and there weren’t many people around. A group of men started hassling us as we looked for transport to our hotel. I was scared, and I was trying hard not to show it. Having friends with me helped. It would have been a very different experience alone.
And then in the Himalayas, in a small town called Almora, we went for a walk in the afternoon, and it was beautiful. But when we went out again later, things had shifted. I remember noticing that very clearly. Since then, I’ve been much more cautious at night. I’m likely to stay in, or if I do go out, I’ll take a taxi. The lighting matters. How people are moving matters. Whether the energy feels settled or unsettled matters. None of that comes from an app.
How do you hold complexity without outsourcing your judgment?
I lived in Sudan from 2005 to 2009, during the Darfur war. Before I moved there, I asked friends who worked with NGOs which places they’d visited and found the people to be warm and welcoming. They said Sudan. And they were right. Day to day, Khartoum was fine. People went to work. Life continued. Women smiled at me. I still paid attention to where I went and how information traveled, and when things shifted in response to political events, I adapted. I was able to hold both the ordinary and the larger context at the same time.
That’s what I’m trying to do now, traveling through Southeast Asia. I don’t want to arrive with so much caution built in that I can’t actually be present. I want a place with 24-hour reception so that if I have a concern, someone will take it seriously. I want to be understood when I ask questions. I notice how people respond when safety comes up. Whether they offer context or brush past it tells me something about how much I can trust that environment.
What does it mean to feel resourced when you travel?
Something I’ve been thinking about more lately is that our tolerance for ambiguity shapes where we’re willing to travel, and that’s not a character flaw. Some places require you to be comfortable with things shifting, plans changing, and information being incomplete. In those cases, the answers are contextual rather than definitive. That doesn’t make those places unsafe, but it does mean they ask something different of you.
I’ve seen women judge themselves for not wanting that kind of travel yet. I’ve also seen women push themselves into it because they think they should. Neither of those feels especially kind. Part of travelling well, at least for me, has been knowing where I actually feel resourced: practically, emotionally, and in my nervous system. That’s what I want to help you think through too.
A small invitation
This week, pay attention to what you do when you don’t have the full picture. Do you push or pause? In which situations do you wait, and in which do you decide? You don’t need to change anything yet. Just notice the pattern.
Join the community
And if you want a place to explore these questions more slowly, with other women who are thinking about solo travel in this season of life, you’re welcome in the Skool community. It’s a space to talk honestly about what comes up, without pressure to be brave or get it right.