Salon Wanderlust | Is solo travel worth the risk?

Women's dilemma
By Dawn MacKeen
Is solo travel worth the risk?
Florence
By Jan Morris
The most civilized city of all time
D E P A R T M E N T S
The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Buco time: A feast for that extra hour
Mondo Weirdo
A piercing Hindu fest
Road Warrior
Business travel & beyond
Table Talk
From the medieval torture museum in Amsterdam to piles of skeletons at a World War I battlefield, world travelers discuss the strangest museums they've visited in the Wanderlust discussion area

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Your virtual travel agency

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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Oct. 14, 1997

This place has legs
By Catherine Seipp
In search of the perfect Hollywood hangout
A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

[Is solo travel worth the risk?]

_____women's dilemma:
IS SOLO TRAVEL WORTH THE RISK?

BY DAWN MACKEEN | the irony of it all was how beautiful it was: mountains covered with Christmas trees, decorating the inclines like ornaments; hiking trails for miles; cabins with smoke pluming from their chimney tops; bright stars lighting the sky; the sound of cows mooing and clanking their bells.
Inside one of those cabins, on a bottom bunk in the middle of all this serenity, Laurie Gough's stomach was turning. First she heard the unzip of the pants, then the big leather boots dropping on the floor, one by one. "Move," he commanded in a thick Italian accent. And then she could feel him lying on her, all six feet of him, the strong body she once found attractive metamorphosed into something else.
"I kept saying, 'No, go away, I want to sleep.' I had my knees up to my chest and was trying to kick him away with my boots, but he was clenching both my wrists back over my head. As soon as you don't have your arms, you are so powerless."
Chico -- the suave, handsome man she met in northern Italy -- raped her that night. He twisted her trust in other people and shaped it into a seething ball of anger. Tore a hole deep inside her.
"I was in shock, I was so filled with anger and betrayal and mad at myself for getting into the situation. I kept thinking, 'How did this happen, how could I attract such a dark force?'"
At one point or another, a woman traveling alone usually runs into a situation like the one Gough did that afternoon while sitting next to a lake looking at a map. A man comes up to her and asks her to go on a hike into the mountains. She decides to go. Why not, she thinks. Locals know the area better than tourists anyway, and she has taken chances on strangers before -- traveled for a couple of weeks with a guy she met in Morocco, spent the night at some guy's house in London, talked until dawn in a Grecian campground with a backpacker who came up to her from out of the shadows -- and everything had turned out OK.
But this time it's different. This guy leads her far up into the mountains, to a point where the trails splinter off in unknown directions and turning back isn't an option. They end up staying overnight in an abandoned cabin, and he traps her there for a day.

N E X T+P A G E+| The joys of aloneness
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ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL ELROD