In October 2017, crossing a momentary highway in the village of Ein Bokek, I said goodbye to friends, who had hosted me in Tel Aviv for a week. The young man waiting by the side of his black car would be my ride across the Arava desert for the next hour or so. We had met on Couchsurfing. He was driving me to a village called Idan, 20 minutes north on the south side of the Dead Sea, where my couch or a room awaited in a moshav for Israeli youth, recently exited from military service.
Beyond my eye’s corner the Dead Sea, splitting Israel and Jordan, was serene and unmoving. Inside a nervous sea crashed, waking and conjuring fear. I was traveling solo, as a woman in her late thirties, separated and divorced from a long-time love and a career. My resume with social networking apps was brief. I had tried, tested and given up on online dating within a year. I had ride-shared with Uber and Lyft and had stayed in Airbnb’s around the world. I had couchsurfed once. I had never driven with a stranger alone, across a desert in a foreign land.
I crossed the road, smiling and mildly relieved. He looks harmless, my height at least. Manageable in the event, things were to go off-sides. From across the road I could not see the kindness in his eyes. When we shook hands, I was struck by how earnest and inviting they were, like his digital profile - “A month-long camel ride in India. A fan of Sadguru.”
Short of a year ago, I had left the only life that I had known – a home that once had a husband and a dog. Then there was the 12-hour work day with its relentless pursuit of deal making, buying and selling financial products and the silent shuffle of money being made and lost. Travel prior was functional, mostly business, and paid for by an expense account. Lavish dinners, capped by a heady cocktail, hotel rooms where the thread count was 500 to start were the norm.
When the job ended in 2016 and I had nothing but a blank slate to recreate from, I resolved to rewrite one year through travel and exploration. My challenge was to travel and talk to strangers and surrender to hospitality that could not be bought; to use the network of newfound relationships, some formed instantly, and some during travel itself, and to travel solo as much as I could. I had stopped in Europe, visited parts of southeast Asia and India. Israel was my second last stopping point of traveling on the hospitality network. As I crossed the road, I was reminded of how far I was from the cushioned comforts of an east coast American life, close to New York, with its grinning skyline and mile-high ambitions.
Falling into trust
I was not trained to trust at first sight. In my old business on the trading floor, everything was due-diligenced– a potential trading partner, a client, a new relationship. Trust had to be earned, created and re-created. I was trained to mitigate risk and catch what could go wrong, and quantify the probability of loss reduction.
The premise to relationship building between a salesperson and her client was defined. Every communication was a transaction, designed to end in a trade. The basis was to maximize value generation on both sides, and money was the metric, money lost and money gained. In Couchsurfing, even if the premise was to find a couch, a host, a friend and many variations of this, the contract could be fluid. The basis of exchange, sometimes tenuous. In the presence of such un-structure, my mind argued, much could go wrong. Besides, how could something so good be for free?
And then there was Rome, where I had couchsurfed once before. Much to my discomfort, I found upon arrival that my male host was alone, and not with his partner as had been advertised. 10 miles of a guided tour through Rome and a 2-course meal later, I concluded that I was being much too paranoid, until my host arrived at the threshold of my doorless room that evening, fresh from a shower in a towel, waiting for an invitation. My heart was racing. I froze first, then turned off the light and pretended to fall asleep. Like that I lay in the throbbing darkness for minutes that stretched like hours, until I sensed that he was no longer at the door. That encounter left a mark. I could not shake off the unease of not being able to buy my way into quality control– this hospitality exchange network was free after all.
A Zipcode of Trust. Via WhatsApp
With Yigal, I only had a few text threads on Whatsapp to fall back on and a brief study of Facebook posts. I was going off tonality of text and emojis. The back-and-forth between us divined a sincerity of persona and common interest. But I could not help but linger in caution. When Yigal offered to drive me across the desert, I was not entirely sure why he did not want anything in return, except a conversation. I momentarily forgot that this was what I had gone seeking that year myself.
Learning to trust as a solo female traveler
In the middle of the Arava, I had no bearing. According to T-Mobile, I was in Jordan. Data was expensive. I resolved to only use it in the event of an abduction. But I did not tell my mother that I was doing this. She would have broken a hundred coconuts at every temple she passed, if she had known.
Fresh from Rome, I knew that traveling alone as a woman meant that I had to get very good at reading the emotional graph of a stranger in minutes and parsing motivations. Within 20 minutes of being in the car with Yigal, I knew that I was going to be just fine, which is when I texted my host-friends from Tel Aviv, “I am good and well on my way.” It was in the way he drove, with his hands steady on the steering wheel, like as if he were in meditation. His hands did not stray and his eyes mostly fixed on a distant landscape like his thoughts. It was in the unshakeable pauses between chatter, where he was comfortable not filling the gaps, that I knew that he had no interest in impressing me. It was in how he made sure we could stop and see some sights, always lingering a few steps behind me, never eager to be too close or demanding to be heard. When we stood to take a picture, I did not fidget. I had a palpable sense that everything was unmoving around us, and I was safe here.
For two hours we drove through the stunning aridity of the Arava rising to a setting sun, stopping at scenery, silence punctuating conversation, an earnest exchange of life histories. We had started at different points of origin, I, from India and he, from Israel. We were both nomads, constant in our quest for home. At least one of us knew that home was in many places. We loved yoga; Yigal did more meditation than I could then muster. Silence prevailed many times and it took me to a familiar place like the vast, sweeping quietude of the Arava. When we gathered our thoughts and talked again, it was with a simmering ferocity – about what it means to be human, to explore the mind, the transporting power of plant medicine, psychedelics and the many ways in which we could travel outside the comfort of our skin.
An Arava Sunset. PC: Nirupa Umapathy & Yigal
I had underestimated travel’s inherent magic – in its ability to transmute to familiar from unfamiliar, in its facilitation of big leaps where strangers could come together and create an unexpected sense of place. I had also underestimated my own hunger for a kind of contact that went beyond the push and pull of romance– I simply wanted to be seen and heard. This desire had not found an outlet through the ups and downs of a failing marriage, and definitely through the wrangling around a job, which at times felt as alien as this desert landscape. It seemed I was craving for just the deep, unshored intimacy of a conversation. In the unfamiliarity of a foreign place, I wanted to be seen through the eyes of a stranger so I could see myself anew again.
It was dark when Yigal pulled up in the dusty, straw-covered, make-do parking lot of the moshav, where I would make my bed the next few days. In the darkness, I could see Rotem, my Couchsurfing host. Yigal and he chatted, a conversation as foreign as their languages. I was nervous to see Yigal go. He had become my familiar. When Rotem turned to greet me, I noted that his smile could light a starless night. He looked not more than in his mid-20s. And just like that my fears dissolved. As Yigal made his way back to the car, I looked back— grateful for an enriched passage, fed fat with conversation. I looked back with a pang and fondness for a new friend, who I will perhaps never meet again. As Rotem and I walked into the moshav, a group of young, smiling faces greeted me. Dinner preparations were in swing. I had arrived on the eve of Sukkot, just in time to break bread with more strangers and kinsfolk at time’s splitting instant.
Rotem, Nirupa & Friends. Mushav Idan. October 2017. PC: Rotem T
This is Part 3 of a series of stories on traveling alone, surfing the social network and the alchemy of human stories and relationships.
Find my other stories on www.radicaleverything.com/blog