I have been a private guide for solo travelers for years. I find it a charming thing to do, because the 1-on-1 setting enables me to give my undivided attention.
Last year I had the chance to experience being a travel companion for almost 3 weeks, accompanying the amazing Helene Cincebeaux on her Cruize adventure in Central- and South America. It was during this trip, that I came to the profound realization why I want to be a travel companion for solo traveling women. In this story, I’ll tell you why.
Traveling the world at 83
In the summer of 2022, at a small retreat in the heart of Europe, I ran into Helene, one of the most extraordinary women I had ever encountered. ‘When I grow up, I want to be just like her!’ I thought to myself as it dawned on me that this radiant, colorful woman who traveled by herself from Florida via Zanzibar to a barefoot hippy-retreat in the Czech Republic was already 83 years old!
Helene loves to travel and she is determined to visit at least a 100 countries in her lifetime. But the cold and rain that pestered us that summer in Eastern Europe was too inconvenient for her, so after 2 days Helene left, feeling very ill. She left me a scrap paper with an email address. I wrote instantly and a month later she replied, safe from her home in Florida, fortunately in good health again after a pretty long convalescence.
Traveling companion wanted
In her email, she made me an offer that made my head spin at first. Helene had booked two back-to-back cruise adventures and asked me to come along as her travel companion. She explained that even though she herself felt completely safe at all times anywhere, Helene’s two sons didn’t like their mother traveling alone anymore (after a scary incident in Italy involving a shady busdriver). Helene had asked a niece to join her, but the niece had backed out. Would I want to take her place?
One look at the destinations (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, to name a few…) was enough to say ‘hell yes!’ immediately, not thinking too much about the consequences. I had never been on a cruise before and I love to dive into the unknown. Little did I know about how much I was going to learn from this whole Cruise-Bonanza (as Helene and I called it).
A cruise is (not) a slice of live
Being a guide in Amsterdam has made me develop a sensitivity towards tourist-oriented endeavors. Sometimes I love how a certain aspect of Amsterdam is made accessible and attractive for foreign travelers. For instance all the maintenance that is done to keep the 17th century Canal Ring in a briljant state. Or the fact that I can find a fresh herring stall in most neighborhoods, where I can let my clients taste this Dutch delicacy. But I am very wary of tourist traps and try to keep my clients out of these cynical cesspools as much as possible (hence the complementary itinerary advice I give out to all my potential clients!).
As soon as we embarked on our first cruise ship, sailing out of the port of Miami, I realized that I had to put this professional snobbism away. The whole point of being on a cruise ship is that you can relax to the max because the real world is kept at bay at all times (and all costs). On our ports of call, this inescapable escapism was borderline absurd and cringingly colonial (faux Maya temple spa-sessions on the shore of Mexico, a ‘local’ marketplace on the Roatàn docks, with a guarded wall around it to separate us from the real locals). But even then, some passengers opted for staying safely on board, letting their picture taken before a sign that said ‘Greetings from Honduras’, before heading back to the bar or the casino.
How to behave in this situation? Try and error was my go to strategy. And I learned quickly.
Companionship is not the same as guiding
On our first port of call, Roatàn I had an off grid excursion planned to take us away from the tourist trap nonsense. I knew Monique, a Dutch friend of a friend, who could show us the island. Mo picked us up, on the ‘real’ side of the fence surrounding the Cruise-port. We drove far away from all the fakeness, to the other side of that lushful green paradise. There, we enjoyed a grilled fish lunch in a tiny shack of a restaurant, built on a ramshackle pier, overlooking the rainforest kissing the turquoise waves, surrounded by emerald hummingbirds.
The tour guide in me was very happy with the results of my trip-planning (hummingbirds!), but I could also see that this whole excursion had been a bit too much on the wild side for Helene. So I decided to pace myself and follow her lead from there on.
And that is when I started to see what I could add as a travel companion.
Moving with Helene
By paying close attention to her, I could easily follow Helene’s rhythm during the day. Because although she is an adventurous, high spirited soul, she also has a body that has been on this planet for quite some years already. And of course she does not like to be reminded of the limits that this places on her. I took it upon myself to prevent that from happening, which meant that I needed to keep these limits in mind and work with them.
So I relaxed by the pool on the sundeck, while she napped until rested. Helene ironically called us the ‘cupcakes’, which meant that we took our time to dress ourselves up and ‘put on our pretty faces’ for dinner and the evening entertainment, enjoying ourselves like teenagers getting ready for a night out.
I gave her my arm, while we walked the hallways like two ‘belles of the ball’. In the restaurants, I read the menu to her, so that her ailing eyesight wouldn’t spoil her moment of sheer enjoyment of all the all-inclusive-yummies we were about to devour. We shared our desserts so we could try them all. We literally fell off our chairs with roaring belly laughs, floating in our little cruise-bubble.
On our transfer days, moving in and out of busy airports in Panama and Buenos Aires, my job as a companion felt more serious. I guarded Helene like a pitbull, making sure she could skip the lines, pass security with priority, thinking and planning ahead to make sure the journey would be doable for my friend, keeping track of our designated route. I didn’t let my guard down until I had her safely back home.
Reflections on life
And we talked. For the three weeks that we traveled together, we were engaged in an ongoing, highly personal, reflective conversation about her life as a woman. Helene’s childhood as a poor immigrants daughter in Syracuse NY in the 1940’s, her wild cheerleading years with her college sweetheart in the 1950’s, motherhood and her disenchantment of marriage in the 1960’s, the freedom she found in traveling to her roots in Eastern Europe, researching folk culture, writing books about this endangered folklore, making exhibitions about it and guiding thousands of fellow Americans to the villages of their ancestors in the heart of Europe.
I was enchanted by this opportunity to be close to someone who has lived through several life cycles. Long enough to look at her own existence from a semi-detached place of wonderment, realizing that all her fleeting actions and interactions on this planet were adding up to a biographical storyline. And I could see how her storyline had crossed the storylines of all the people she had met, including my own, forming patterns of entanglement. Like a tapestry.
I felt honored and humbled that Helene trusted me enough to relax into a state of mind that enabled her to reflect on her life. And I realized that I would love to enable more women to do this. I would love to listen to more women talk about their lives.
The invisible foremothers
A month before I went on this journey with Helene, I had given my mother a book I had written just for her. It was my attempt to give form to my mothers-mother, my ‘oma’.
I had felt the need to write this story because I never had the chance to meet my oma. She had been a woman whose life had become obscured by her early death at 42, but who had already been barely noticeable during her life, being ‘nothing more’ than a housewife and a mother. In the first chapter of that book, I lamented on the fact that women don’t pass on their family name to their children, and their work is nothing more than an ‘oeuvre ephemere’ of maintenance and household chores. My foremothers seem to exist only as side notes to their fathers and husbands. So who am I, as a woman?
On the other hand, I had felt my ‘oma’ guiding my hand in writing down her life story. It made me realize that our foremothers are imprinted in our language, the mother-tongue they pass on to their children while taking care of them. I have learned mine from my mother, while she nurtured and raised me and she has learned it from hers, ad infinitum.
My foremothers might be invisible, I can bring them to life by using my language and stepping in the role of care-giver. I honor them by telling stories and holding space for others to live and tell theirs.
Serendipity
Meeting Helene at that liminal stage in my own life was a game-changer. Helene, a woman that had made it her life’s work to preserve the non-canonised folk culture that had been kept alive by generations of women, orally passing on knowledge of pre-christian Goddess worshiping in the form of dances, headscarves, rituals and embroidery. Helene, a woman with a ‘can-do’ mentality, who built up her own tour guiding company, based on her passion for her foremothers roots.
My chance to be Helene’s travel companion felt like the universe was lighting a beacon for me. ‘Look!’, it said, ‘you can do this too, and you should!’
Offering my services as a travel companion to solo traveling women is my way of honoring our shared past as women. I show up with my storyline, with my language taught by my foremothers, and by doing so, I hold space for you to reflect on yours. That is what Storylines is about!