Ride or die
With female travel on the rise, should women be more careful than ever?
Krabi Province, Thailand
June 2018
“Stop shifting your weight around you’re making it impossible to steer!” I clung to my friend’s waist as she drove us down the barren road ahead. Powdered dirt grazed my face, clinging to the sweat which dripped down my skin. She didn’t have a driver’s license, apparently you didn’t need one to drive a moped. Nonetheless I felt nervous being her first passenger, especially in a country so far away from home.
Cars shot past us, beeping angrily as they overtook our rickety bike. “Shouldn’t we go in the lane with the other bikes?” I suggested intermittently. “Stop being a backseat driver,” Lily retorted.
The road was cracked and uneven, sandwiched by desolate fields. As I looked up at the swollen grey sky above us, I thought of a friend who was travelling in another part of Thailand. “I had an accident,” she had WhatsApped me a few days before. “Shit! Are you okay??” I had replied. “Fine now. Don’t take out a moped when it’s rainy,” she texted back, “It gets really slippery.”
Sisters doin' it for themselves
The 2018 TrekkSoft Travel Trends Report saw an increase in female travel last year, attributing this to women’s ever improving socioeconomic status. Yariella Coello, founder of “The Beauty Backpacker” travel blog, said she thought this emerging trend was “a wonderful thing.”
The report revealed that the biggest concern for female travellers was their safety. Yariella said: “I’d always been encouraging solo travel, but I had some uncomfortable experiences with men hitting on me… some very strange things that made me quite uneasy, and then I was like ‘Okay, I can see why this puts people off.’”
I looked at Google Maps on my phone screen, the battery symbol in the top right hand corner falling down closer towards red. Our much anticipated day out to Krabi’s famous hot springs was deflating rapidly, the threat of rain from clouds above us grew more imminent and the road ahead stretched out further and further.
The panic that sat with us on the bike remained silent. There was an unspoken consensus that, if we didn’t discuss the fact this was going horribly wrong, maybe it wouldn’t. All the while, we were regularly being dodged by cars going much faster than we had the ability to, our bodies uncomfortably exposed on our bike. “Hail Mary, full of grace...” I muttered under my breath, handing our fate over to divine intervention.
Above the rumble of our engine and the sounds of the cars around us, our exhaust began to spit smoke and our speed started to lag. I clung tighter onto Lily, it seemed my prayers were not being answered.
A man’s world?
Four months ago, 21-year-old backpacker Grace Millane was tragically murdered in Auckland, allegedly following a date. The Independent’s Biba Kang writes on the topic, “Instead of telling our daughters to be more careful, we should be telling our sons to be more caring.” For many women, the suggestion that they should be careful while travelling simply highlights the fact that men must change their ways so as to cease to be a threat to women. While this is true, this may be an oversimplified perspective.
Efia Sulter left the UK in 2016 for a global excursion, and now uses her blog, “Effytalkslife”, to “inspire women to make life an adventure”. Nearly two years into her travels, while visiting the Philippines, Efia was sexually assaulted. In light of her experiences, Efia said, “I would like not to say this, but I definitely think female travellers should have more of a concern for their safety than men because, typically a man is bigger and is less of a target.”
Travel marketing organisation Mower recently published statistics which showed that two in five women are sexually harassed while travelling, demonstrating the prevalence of this problem.
Are men exempt from anxiety when travelling? Director of travel marketing firm “Check-in Asia” Gary Bowerman shared that he has had numerous bad experiences while travelling, including being robbed at gunpoint. However, he added that, “On many occasions I’ve been asked by women travellers if they could stand closer to me or talk directly to me for a while because people were making them feel uncomfortable.”
Bonding with the locals
“I think we should pull over,” Lily shouted back to me, her voice muffled by wind and the unhealthy revs of our not-so-trusty companion. “It looks like there’s a village here.”
As we veered to the side of the road in the “village” we found ourselves in – a few shop fronts at the side of the road – the bike gave up completely, providing just enough power to drag us towards the pavement.
“Shit.” We stood back and looked at the rusty bike, turning the key hopefully, only to be met with a stubborn splutter from the engine. Barely able to lift the bike between us, unaware of our whereabouts and clueless about mechanics, defeat enveloped us. We lingered at the side of the road: a sweaty, hopeless exhibit.
We had quickly become the talk of the “town” and three local women came swarming out of the café-come-pawn-shop-come-home we stood outside of. Speaking not a word of English, they surrounded our bike and prodded at different parts of the mechanics whilst chatting to us excitedly, entirely unfazed by the language barrier. As Lily and I exchanged clueless glances, one of the women disappeared, returning with a small Thai man wearing a bright red “Esso” uniform and a look of father-like concern. I recognised the petrol station logo and felt reassured.
Esso man fetched an acquaintance of his, not sporting the familiar logo, who pulled up on a moped with an elevated sidecar. Without a word, he effortlessly scooped our bike up into the sidecar and indicated to Lily to hop on the back of his bike. Perplexed, on she got and off she went.
I stood among the Thai gossip from the locals who surrounded me. Time began to drag. I texted Lily, “Where are you??”, no reply.
A few minutes later Esso man reappeared, alone. He motioned towards his bike. Resigning myself to going with the somewhat terrifying flow, on I got. “The lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women…” I continued to mutter under my breath.
The bigger picture
Are the risks to women’s safety greater when travelling than those closer to home? While there are definite dangers which pose themselves to female travellers, these are arguably present everywhere. Travel writer Trevor Baker said, “We tend to overestimate the safety of the familiar, and overestimate the danger of the unfamiliar.
“Statistically, it’s young men that get attacked outside bars in city centres. Young women get attacked at home, by their husbands or boyfriends. Logically we should be saying, young men stay at home, young women, get away from your boyfriends, go trekking in the Himalayas.”
It is a sad reality that women face greater danger than men in their everyday lives. However, this does not mean they should be deterred from travelling, but simply encouraged to take the same safety precautions in unknown places as they would in any situation.
STA travel expert Justine Ducros said that women simply need to be savvy on their travels: "Get tips from female locals and other travellers. There are some great online networks that connect female travellers all around the world, like Girls Love Travel and the Solo Female Traveller Network."
Relief.
After driving a few hundred metres, we reached a metal shack functioning as a garage. There stood Lily chatting to a woman behind a counter, and Esso man’s friend working on our bike. After 15 minutes and a tenner spent, our bike was repaired. My prayers had been answered. 20% phone battery remaining and Google Maps told us we were a 10-minute drive from the hot springs. Scraping together all the enthusiasm we could garner between us, we hopped back on our bike.
A large sign above us read “Krabi Hot Springs, Welcome!” As we stepped off our bike, the sky gave one final angry rumble before erupting. We huddled under a flimsy plastic poncho, sprinting through winding paths until we were covered by large trees. A hundred yards in front of us, we spied Krabi’s “must see” attraction. Four tiny pools, filled to the brim with tourists armed with selfie sticks and an unsatisfiable desire for the perfect photo. This was it?
Girls just wanna have fun
Despite the anxieties women endure when travelling, the TrekkSoft Travel Report stated that female travellers interviewed had positive experiences overall.
Efia of “Effytalkslife” concludes that, “I think women should be more conscious, however I don’t think that should stop women from travelling, because in everyday life you need to be more anxious, walking home from a club, walking home from work, it’s always gonna be something, unfortunately.” Although in an ideal world this would not be the case, the solution in Efia’s view is not that women should not be taking risks, but that they should simply tread with caution when taking them.
A sound logic, Yariella Coello echoed these sentiments, saying: “I don’t think we should be putting women off, I just think that we should be equipping women to be as safe as possible.”
