A Benefit of Traveling Alone

Traveling can have its downside. When you have a travel with a friend you are never alone, you build on your friendship and create dozens of shared experiences, you laugh at what you see together, and, most importantly, you come out of the trip with great stories and memories to tell and reminisce over when you're tottering down the hall on your walker together years later. Traveling alone finds one lonely, wandering from one site to the next, wondering what it would be like to have someone to share your experiences with, introspecting too much, and taking lots of empty pictures.
However, when you do travel with a friend, you are in a comfortable place that excludes, to an extent, people outside your duo (or trio, or however large your social circle is). The trip gets filtered through your friendship and every you see is interpreted through the relationship that you already have with said travel buddy. When you are traveling alone, not only is everything fresh, but you have the opportunity to make new friends and, even if only for a day or two, form a much deeper bond than you would have if you were already with a friend from the past.
I am, of course, not suggesting that you can become amazingly close with a person in a day or two, but when you have a need for companionship, you open up that much more easily.
Over the past few days I got to hang out with a woman from my Spanish class and a girl from England that we randomly met in the Recoleta Cemetery; I cannot speak for them but I had a lot of fun, a lot more fun with these two otherwise total strangers than I had on any other day by myself. Forming a connection with another person is really an amazing magical thing that has inherent value. In the places we call home, if we are lucky, we have a strong network of friends and relatives, people we already have connections with and can count on, but we can (at least, I almost did) forget the fun of connecting to someone else based only, at first, on our common language. Here's to many more random travel buddies, and here are my first two travel buddies: