Why Sri Lankan women need to travel solo (and why I finally did)

A letter for every South Asian girl who was told the world wasn’t made for her.

There’s a calendar I still think about.

My uncle had been to England long before that kind of trip was anything close to ordinary for someone from our family. He came back with stories, gifts for everyone in the family, and a calendar. A simple, paper calendar with photographs of the English countryside, one for each month.

September was Cotswold.

I didn’t know what Cotswold was. I was a little girl in Sri Lanka with no internet and no real frame of reference for a village that looked like it had been pulled straight out of a storybook, all honey-coloured stone walls and window boxes overflowing with flowers. September is my birthday month, so that page stayed up longer than the others. I would stare at it and wonder what kind of world existed where people just lived like that, surrounded by all that quiet and all that beauty.

That calendar was my first travel obsession. It wouldn’t be my last.

The Discovery Channel was my whole personality

We didn’t have a lot growing up. Middle-class Sri Lanka means you have enough, but you don’t have the kind of enough that includes plane tickets and hotel rooms in foreign countries. Travel was something that happened to other people, mostly in documentaries.

So I watched every single one.

After school, the Discovery Channel was non-negotiable. I remember one episode about London, Big Ben, the Thames, Westminster, the whole thing. They played it on repeat for a while, and I watched it every single time. There was something about seeing these places through a screen that made them feel both impossibly far and absolutely real. The Hampton Court Palace exploration was another one they constantly re-ran. I didn’t care. I watched it every time it came on.

For my child mind, the most logical career path was to become a Discovery Channel travel host. That was the only way I could figure out how to see the world. You become the person who gets paid to go everywhere, you film it, you tell people about it, and somehow that solves the problem of being a girl from Colombo with limited money and a passport that doesn’t open many doors.

I had no idea I’d end up doing something not entirely different from that, just without the camera crew.

The inconvenient truth about being a Sri Lankan woman who wants to travel

Here’s what nobody tells you when you grow up dreaming about the world: the dream is allowed, the doing is complicated.

South Asian families, and Sri Lankan families especially, carry a very specific kind of love that expresses itself as restriction. You don’t go out late. You don’t travel alone. You don’t take risks. These rules aren’t born from cruelty; they come from fear, from generations of women who were taught that the world outside was dangerous and that safety lived inside the boundaries set by family. The girls who didn’t follow the rules became cautionary tales. The girls who did were called good.

I was raised in a strict family. Travelling solo, especially as a woman, simply wasn’t a conversation anyone was having. There was no framework for it. There was no language for a young Sri Lankan woman saying, “I want to go to Thailand alone.” That sentence didn’t compute.

And then there’s the passport.

Sri Lankan passport holders do not have the luxury of casual travel. The visa requirements for most countries are extensive, expensive, and often humiliating in the amount of documentation you have to produce to prove that you won’t do whatever it is they think you’re going to do. While my friends in other countries were casually booking weekend trips to Europe, I was calculating whether I’d even be allowed in. The privilege of a strong passport is invisible until you don’t have one. Then it’s all you see.

So I had two things working against me: a culture that said women shouldn’t travel alone, and a passport that made travel feel like something requiring a committee and a prayer. For a long time, I let both of those things win.

The year my mum got sick changed everything

In my university years, my mum was bedridden for two years. I won’t go too deeply into that, because that story belongs to her more than it belongs to this blog. But what I will say is this: when the person who normally holds your world together is suddenly the one who needs holding, you find out very quickly what you’re made of.

I was coming home around 10 pm some nights after finishing University lectures, managing things I’d never managed before, making decisions I’d never been trusted to make before. I was doing all of it alone. And somewhere in the middle of all that, something shifted in me. Not immediately, not in one dramatic moment, but slowly. A realisation settling in like a long exhale.

If I could do this, the hard and unglamorous version of independence, I could do anything.

I stopped waiting for permission. Not in a rebellious, burning-it-all-down kind of way. More like a quiet decision. I decided that instead of waiting for life to happen to me, I was going to make life happen to me. Small steps at first, but deliberate mine.

My first trip and the countries that followed

My very first trip out of Sri Lanka was to visit my mum in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. It was short. It was nothing close to the solo adventure I’d eventually go on. But I stood at the base of the Burj Khalifa, and I felt something crack open in my chest. The world was real. It was right there.

Then came the solo trips. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. The countries I could reach with my Sri Lankan passport without a mountain of paperwork and rejection anxiety. I researched every single one of them like it was my full-time job. I planned itineraries. I booked guesthouses. I figured out which local buses went where and whether I’d need cash or if cards were accepted. I did all of it alone, and I loved every single second of it.

People ask me what my favourite part of solo travel is, and I always say the research, which confuses them. But I mean it. The research is where the relationship with a place begins. You start to understand a country before you even land in it. You learn what matters to people there, what they eat and how they move through their days, which temples close at noon and which night markets are worth the chaos. By the time I arrived somewhere, it already felt a little bit like mine.

I was feeling something I didn’t have a word for at the time. Liberal, maybe. Unbounded. Like the version of myself I was always meant to be, had just been waiting for me to show up.

Then I worked at Intrepid Travel and heard the word “Machu Picchu”

Working in the digital team at Intrepid Travel, one of the largest adventure travel companies in the world, did something irreversible to me. I was surrounded by travel every single day. Destinations I’d only ever seen in documentaries were now things I was building web pages about, writing copy for, and looking at in high-resolution photographs on a work computer.

The first time I heard the word Machu Picchu, I got the spelling completely wrong. I had to look it up. And while I was looking it up, I found a video of a blind man hiking the Inca Trail to the top. All of it. On his own.

I watched that, and I thought: if he can do that, I have no excuse.

Not just for Machu Picchu, but for all of it. For every place I’d been telling myself was too far, too expensive, too complicated, too much for a girl like me. If a blind man could hike to one of the most challenging sites in the world, I could figure out the visa paperwork and the hostel booking and the solo dinner at a restaurant where I didn’t speak the language.

Canada opened the door I’d always been standing outside

I moved to Canada in 2023, after COVID had rearranged the plans and timelines of basically everyone on earth. And with a Canadian residency came something I hadn’t fully anticipated: a different relationship with travel.

The world cracked open.

I have been to more than twenty countries now. Switzerland, where I cried a little bit standing on a mountain because I recognised it from pictures I’d looked at as a child. The Netherlands, where I walked along canals and thought about how different my life could have looked if I’d stopped dreaming at that calendar in September. Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Japan. Japan. Every single thing I’d watched on the Discovery Channel and then spent decades thinking was for other kinds of people.

It was for me. It always had been.

What I need you to know, if you’re reading this

If you’re a South Asian woman reading this, maybe from Sri Lanka, maybe from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, maybe from a diaspora community where your parents still carry all the old rules across the ocean with them, I need to say this clearly.

The world is not as dangerous as they told you.

Solo travel will not ruin you. It will not make you unmarriageable, irresponsible or reckless. What it will do is show you that you are far more capable than anyone gave you credit for, including yourself. It will show you that you can read a map in a city where you don’t speak the language. That you can sit alone at a restaurant and enjoy your own company. That you can make decisions, solve problems, get lost and find your way back, all without anyone’s permission or assistance.

The cultural baggage is real. I’m not dismissing it. The family pressure is real. The passport inequality is real. The financial barriers are real. None of those things are in your head.

But here’s what’s also real. That little girl who stared at a picture of Cotswold until she had it memorised. The one who watched Discovery Channel episodes on repeat because the world on that screen felt like something that was meant for her, too. She was right. It was meant for her.

It was meant for you.

Start small if you have to. A short train ride somewhere alone. A solo day trip. A neighbouring country with a straightforward visa. The size of the first step doesn’t matter. What matters is that you take one that is entirely and completely yours.

I started with a calendar on a wall in Colombo. I ended up in twenty countries and counting.

You have no idea where you could end up.