Solo Traveling to the Places Headlines Teach You to Fear

Solita

Nayeema Raza, host of 'Smart Girl Dumb Questions,' discusses her experiences traveling solo to high-conflict regions like the West Bank and

Key takeaways

• Nayeella Raza utilizes a 'gaze-through' technique to navigate potentially unsafe areas by looking through people rather than making direct eye contact.
• The guest emphasizes the importance of securing 'backup numbers' from locals, such as taxi driver Saleh, when traveling alone in uncertain territories.

Main topics

• Solo travel safety
• Geopolitical conflict

Notable quotes

I think it's the questions that we're afraid to ask out loud.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring call for travelers to seek authenti

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) I think that the place that challenged me the most was when I went to Palestine to go to the West Bank. My friend who took me, who is still a dear friend, but he is the worst travel companion. Do you know any bad travel companions? Sure. I love my friend, but he is like just, he doesn't communicate anything. And it's just like, it's all like, you don't understand what's happening. I went expecting that he would take me around and we would go together. So I was curious to see like the holy sites. I have a fascination with religion. The day we left, it was like really last minute. And he's like, oh, we're going to go pick up my friend and we're going to go to a beach party. I didn't pack a bikini to go to the holy sites. I was like, I want to go for a little bit, but I really like want to go do other things, too. And he's like, yeah, yeah, we'll just swing by. It's like, first of all, you don't swing by. It's like an hour and a half away. I was like, I think this is going to be a bad trip. Speaker 1 (0:55) This is Solita, stories of what really happens when you travel alone. The beautiful, the messy, and the moments where you say yes and surprise yourself. I'm your host, Julie Pinheiro. Speaker 1 (1:11) There's a guy every woman has trailed behind because he's got a plan and it's always the same one. Come with me. It'll be fun. Everyone's already there. Maybe she's traveled with him or dated him or been warned about by a friend who dated him to not travel with him. It doesn't matter what country he's in or what language he's speaking. He's probably the same guy on a rooftop in Brooklyn as he is. in Ramallah, Palestine. Naima Raza traveled with this guy on a road trip to the West Bank. It was a trip she'd been wanting to take for over a decade. But the trip truly began when she turned down his itinerary and found her own. Because it's one thing to hold an opinion about a place like this from the comfort of your couch. It's entirely different to go stand in it and follow your own curiosities. Naima Raza is the host of the podcast Smart Girl Dumb Questions. In this episode, we're trading hot girl summer for a trip that actually challenges you. Speaker 1 (2:23) Naima, you host a show called Smart Girl Dumb Questions. It's true. It's a curiosity party and a podcast. Oh, the other thing that is a curiosity party is travel. Yes. Sometimes a party, Speaker 3 (2:33) sometimes not a party, depending on, you know, your air carrier of the day, probably. Speaker 1 (2:38) Oh, God. Sometimes it's a party you don't want to go to. Yes. I'm curious, what is a dumb question and why do you think that we should be asking more of them? Speaker 3 (2:45) Well, I think the whole show title is a bit of a play on the idea that there's no such thing as a dumb question. But. I think it's the questions that we're afraid to ask out loud and we increasingly are asking in private under the dinner table on our phones and pretending we know. And my whole show is about asking those questions out loud, like irreverently to people who are often like surprised to be asked them. And there are also questions that are like just like. fun, entertaining. I just had a peace negotiator on and asked him like a fuck, marry, kill question between Kerry Kissinger and Kushner. And I think it was the first time in his life he'd been asked such a question. Christiane Amanpour doesn't ask that question. Speaker 1 (3:24) He was like, well, I'd like this person at my side. I don't think I want this person at my side. Exactly. It's very PG. Very PG. But Speaker 3 (3:32) speaking of curiosity, I think the whole idea for the show and really my curiosity has been deeply linked to travel. I grew up in Indonesia and Sudan. My dad was at the World Bank. And so I was this Pakistani kid born in the U.S., raised in Asia and Africa, spending a lot of time in Europe. And I always had that permission to ask the question as a result of not being from anywhere. And I think that's like where I kind of invite in the dumbness. For me, it's not dumbness. It's just permission to ask anything that's on our minds and to like make curiosity. cool and communal again, instead of being like kind of private with your chat daddy, you know? With your chat daddy being just Safari on your Speaker 1 (4:08) phone. Speaker 3 (4:09) Or yeah, Safari if you're Speaker 1 (4:10) a Speaker 3 (4:10) browser girl, but you know, Claude, Gemini, whoever's your, you know, internet beau of choice. Speaker 1 (4:16) It's interesting that you sort of had just this free reign to curiosity because you said that you grew up in different places and therefore you were like, well, I'm never really from here. So let me just ask the question. Do you have an early memory of a moment like that? Speaker 3 (4:27) Oh, yeah. It's not going to be a good one. My sister and I kept pet snails when we lived in Khartoum in Sudan. And one day, I remember the snails, like, for many days didn't come out. And we found out that someone in the house had eaten the snails, a Sudanese person who came and worked in the house. Sucked the Speaker 1 (4:43) snail out of the shell? There was a snail? Yeah, it was like, Speaker 3 (4:45) but for us, it was like, but my sister was, like, heartbroken. You know, I remember my sister was always heartbroken, like, whether it was Fakhr-e-Eid, which is, like, where they sacrifice the lambs on Eid al-Adha. a Muslim holiday, or this. My sister was just like, so sad, wouldn't eat meat. And for me, I was like, I'm so curious. Like, what does this else taste like? Why do you eat them? Does everyone here eat them? Like, what else? What other animals do you eat? And, you know, I think as a kid, I just always had that. So that's a very young memory of like, probably I was like four or five and being like that. Speaker 1 (5:16) Can you describe where you grew up around what ages? Like, how did you move around? Speaker 3 (5:21) So I was born in Washington, D.C., and then left to Pakistan for a little bit, then Sudan. And then we moved to Indonesia, to Jakarta, where I basically lived until I was, I want to say 14, 15, like basically for almost 10 years, with a year in D.C. when my mother was sick, then lived in Indonesia. where the country was going through a lot. Like, Suharto fell from power in the late 90s. So the country was just, like, kind of in tumult. Came back to the U.S., did a couple years of high school here, and then went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service. In Washington, D.C. In D.C. Studied international politics and economics and international law, which, spoiler alert, doesn't exist. And then I moved back abroad. So I, like, lived in London, Vietnam, South Africa, Libya, Jordan, a lot of places. Was this for work? Yeah, I kind of had it in my DNA. You know, I worked at a consulting firm called the Monitor Group doing reform work for kind of hardline government. So I worked in Libya, worked in Vietnam when they were doing WTO ascension, spent a lot of time in Jordan, working on a settlement in Ivory Coast. That was a contested election and then came back to the US for grad school and then have been in New York for. six years. And New York is kind of like living. Speaker 1 (6:33) New York is Speaker 3 (6:34) a city that sustains. It's a place I have lived the longest as an adult. And I feel like it sustains me in part because it has like all these different cultures and they're well preserved, right? You can go to like, you know, Curry Hill and I'm speaking in Hindi and going to buy overpriced spices at Coliseum's or there's just such a rich environment of travel in the city that makes other cultures accessible. Speaker 1 (6:56) It's so true. Living in New York, you can go anywhere and feel like you are immersed in something new. Why did you want to do the show? Because I traveled a lot by myself. And then I felt like I was always greeted by like a lot of surprise by people for me traveling alone as a woman. It was one of two responses. It was either surprise or it was like, oh, the world is therefore your backdrop for some sort of personal transformational change. Oh, yeah. Elizabeth Gilbert. Totally. And to me, it felt like there was a huge discrepancy in the middle for like, oh, wait, actually, solo travel, I think, is a thing that challenges you a lot. And I think that that's something that you have a lot of experience. And one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you is because you are going to places where there's a history of geopolitical conflict. Yeah. And I think women alone particularly might not feel like those are places where they can go. But I do think that the possibility for. Understanding something new is huge. And I think that when you travel alone, you are by default more open to understanding new people, new cultures, new contexts, and politically completely new ideas that are different from what you're fed back home. Totally. Speaker 3 (8:05) I think that so much of the world, I mean, I say this as a journalist and someone who works in media, but so much of it is presented at you and to you. And I think there's something particularly in regions that are kind of unknown. I feel like it's less the conflict that draws me, but more like. the unknown nature of it. For me, I know a lot of people like love going to Saint-Tropez and that's totally cool. I've gone to places like North Korea. I've spent time in Libya, places that are hard to understand and I can't really fathom them by watching the news. They're kind of like a meme of themselves as they're presented. And I just want to know how the people live. Speaker 1 (8:38) So Speaker 3 (8:39) it's so interesting you say travel alone because I think It was hard for me to think of solo travel because even when I go somewhere alone, I end up meeting people and I never feel like I'm actually traveling alone. Right. You know. Same. Speaker 1 (8:51) 100%. Always. Yeah. Speaker 3 (8:52) It's like I'm trying to think how many days can you like actually last alone as a solo traveler? And I haven't I've never done like to get a backpack and do the, you know, eat, pray, love, solo adventure world. I feel like I've always gone somewhere and met people or known people. been connected to people because that's what I really love seeing. Like I'm not good at, you know, when you date somebody who's like really into like waking up at 8am for the guided tour of the city. That was like my experience in Havana, Cuba with my then boyfriend. And I'm like, I don't need to see the architectural guided tour. I love meeting the people. Like I'm like a night person. I want to be out having dinners and like seeing where people dance and what they actually talk about. That's what kind of gets me excited about traveling. That's Speaker 1 (9:35) what excites you. What was the first trip that you took by yourself? Speaker 3 (9:38) probably completely by myself was I went to Paris on the way to Pakistan because I was traveling by myself. It must have been like it was in high school. And I was traveling from D.C. and I went to Paris and I remember falling asleep at the Louvre because I was so tired. You fell Speaker 2 (9:57) asleep. And Speaker 3 (9:58) like literally like a mean security guard like woke me up because I was so tired. Like I hadn't slept on the flight. I was like, you Speaker 2 (10:04) know. Speaker 3 (10:04) Like it's Speaker 1 (10:05) a Speaker 3 (10:05) subway station. You're just slumped Speaker 1 (10:07) in Speaker 3 (10:07) the corner. This was before I perfected my trick for sleeping in the back of the bus on a plane, like how to sleep comfortably in economy class. But I didn't know it then at age 15. So that was probably the first time I was like by myself. Speaker 7 (10:21) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:23) Something about your story signals quite a lot of comfort with being out in the world. And I'm curious to think about your childhood for a second. What do you think that you learned about being in new spaces that other people don't understand? Speaker 3 (10:36) I think it really comes down to like the asking, asking for help, asking for permission, asking for having the permission to kind of ask the question is what I've learned most of all. And I think I've also learned a language, body language. You know, I'm really good at reading how people feel and are on the basis of kind of like how they present because I speak some languages like I speak English, Urdu, Spanish, Indonesian and varying states of good. But I think that one language I kind of universally speak is body language. I can tell when someone's bored, when someone wants me to move on, when somebody is like wants to invite me to do something else or Speaker 1 (11:12) doesn't. How do you have the body language? when you're traveling that you want to be approached or you're open? Speaker 3 (11:19) I don't know that I'm thoughtful about it. Like, I think I'm just like delighted. I'm kind of wide eyed when I'm traveling. One thing I will say is, and this is, I think, important for women traveling. I do think as a woman who is Pakistani, spent a lot of time in the rest of the world, I learned like a certain like gaze through of people where. You know, there are parts of Pakistan where you don't really want to be walking by yourself. Yeah. Like there is in Karachi, there was a place called Rainbow City at the Rainbow Market where a lot of like the ripped DVDs would be sold, you know, back in the day when we were kids. And it was like a place where we couldn't go. Our guy cousins would go. And sometimes I'd like ask my cousin Omar to take me. And I remember he taught me this is like never look at someone in the eyes, but don't look down. So it's like you're gazing through someone. So you look like you're determined, you're going, but you're not. lesser than them. And I think that is an important safety kind of technique I've learned. But other than that, I don't feel, you know. No, the Speaker 1 (12:13) gaze through, I think that's powerful because when you're looking, are you saying that when you're looking someone in the eye, you're sort of inviting some sort of interaction? You are. Yeah. I Speaker 3 (12:19) think so. So when you're. You want to look Speaker 1 (12:21) through them. Speaker 3 (12:22) You want to look through them. You want to show that you're Speaker 1 (12:24) not scared. You're not necessarily unaware of yourself. Yeah. Speaker 3 (12:28) I'm heading somewhere. It has nothing to do with you, but like I clocked you, like you're in my peripheral and I'm going. You think about those things, I think more as a woman. Speaker 1 (12:36) Does it feel like some of the challenge of travel has worn off or had worn off? Let's say we're talking about you in your mid-20s. You're venturing to a lot of places alone. You've grown up traveling so much in so many international communities. Did the sheen of it sort of wear off? Yeah, you know, I do Speaker 3 (12:53) think about that. Like, I don't have that travel bug anymore. I really have it for places I haven't seen. I think that's where, like, the novelty, the difference, the cagedness of some of the places that I'm really interested to see myself plays in. because I feel like there's a lot of the world I have seen. And also there's a sameness that's happening in the world right now where many cities you go to, it's the same thing. And I remember watching, I think it was the film Shrek. There's a scene where like everything's like a meme of like a Starbucks