The Day I Became a Viking Woman: How Solo Travel Found Me at 17

It was January 1989. 38 degrees in Bayside suburban Melbourne when I left. The kind of stifling summer heat that clings to your skin and makes the air hum.

When I landed in Sweden, it was minus 20. And the sun didn’t rise.

I was seventeen. I had never left Australia. In fact, I’d barely left my home state.

But somehow, there I was — in Lapland. A place I hadn’t even known existed when I first applied to Rotary Exchange and casually picked Sweden. I imagined blonde people and cinnamon buns.

Instead, I arrived in Lapland in the Arctic Circle. It was dark. Frozen. Wild. And it changed everything.

The first time solo felt like freedom

The truth is, it could have gone either way. That year might have broken me. But instead, it broke me open.

I had the immense luck of being placed with a host family who didn’t coddle me — they championed me. Whenever I hesitated, they’d smile and say:

“Be a Viking woman.”

So I was.

I caught trains and buses alone. I travelled through Europe on my own. I learned to listen, to observe, to adapt. I fell in love with cultures, with differences, with not understanding the language, but knowing how to read a room.

I saw the Northern Lights for the first time, something I hadn’t even known existed. And yet, there they were, painting the sky above my head like it was no big deal - all the time.

Travel became my new normal

When I came home, I wasn’t the same girl who had left.

That first year ignited something in me that never left: a desire to see more, to understand more, to be more. And that shaped the rest of my life.

In my early 20s, I started working for Qantas. That meant travel benefits — incredible ones. But I quickly realised I couldn’t just bring anyone with me. Unless they also worked for Qantas, it was solo or nothing.

So I went solo. Again and again.

It wasn’t some bold choice. It was just my reality. And eventually, it became my joy.

I travelled the world alone in my 20s. I watched. I wandered. I listened. I soaked up markets, languages, seasons, and human rituals.

I learned that travel wasn’t about ticking off sights. It was about becoming.

A scholarship and six months in France

Later, while studying travel marketing part-time and working full-time at Qantas, I won a scholarship.

I took long service leave and moved to Rennes, a town in the Brittany region of France, for six months to study at the International University. I lived in a small apartment above the train station.

My lectures were crammed into Mondays and Tuesdays. The rest of the week? I travelled.

Armed with my Lonely Planet and a rail pass, I spent days riding the TGV to wherever my curiosity led me.

One week it was the Loire Valley, another, a guesthouse in Paris with a coin-operated shower at the end of a freezing hallway. Four flights of stairs, one-star rating, and absolutely no regrets.

It was another defining chapter. Quiet, formative, deeply freeing.

Solo business travel with pleasure

As my career evolved, so did my solo travel. Business trips took me across countries, but I always made time for pleasure — that hybrid of business and leisure. In the travel industry, we have a word for it - Bleasure, it's "pleasure with a B."

Wherever I went, I carved out time to pause, reflect, and connect with where I was.

To me, travel is a privilege. It’s never just logistics. It’s a way of understanding the world — and my place in it.

What solo gave me

Solo travel taught me to trust myself. To find delight in my own company. To be in awe of the world without needing to explain it to anyone else.

It taught me that independence isn’t about being separate from people. It’s about knowing you can carry yourself.

It also taught me to observe and respect not just places, but people.

Their gestures, religions, rituals, and cadences. I became a quiet collector of human stories, which eventually shaped my career as a travel researcher.

And now, decades later, it shapes Solo Travel Collective.

Why this story matters

I don’t tell this story to impress anyone. I tell it to remind you that most of us don’t start solo travel as an act of confidence.

We start because something pushes us. A decision. A breakup. A scholarship. A moment.

What matters is what happens next.

Solo travel gave me the space to meet myself. It showed me that awe, resilience, and joy live just on the other side of unfamiliar.

And maybe, if you’re reading this, you’re standing at that edge too.

If so, welcome. You don’t have to be fearless. You just have to be willing.

Be a Viking woman.

You’ll know what that means soon enough.

Bronxx