The man at the bus station in Guatemala City wanted 200 quetzales for a ticket that cost 40. I knew the real price because I’d checked it the night before, standing in the same spot, watching locals hand over two blue notes and walk away. He saw my backpack. My pale face. My confused Spanish. He did the math. That’s the moment I stopped thinking about safety as something you pack — a money belt, a whistle, a padlock — and started thinking about it as a skill you practice. You get better at it the way you get better at haggling or reading a bus schedule. Slowly. With mistakes. Mostly by paying attention to what everyone around you already knows.
Three years into travelling I got robbed in Lisbon. Not dramatic — no knife, no chase. I set my bag down to photograph a tiled wall in Alfama and when I turned around it was gone. Passport, laptop, six weeks of notes. I sat on a stoop and cried like a child, then spent two days in a police station and an embassy queue. The lesson wasn’t “never put your bag down.” It was that I’d spent months worrying about the wrong things — dark alleys, sketchy neighbourhoods, strangers — while the real risk sat at my own feet, ignored, for eleven seconds.
Why This Matters
Safety advice for solo travellers is usually either terrifying or useless. Either the world is a den of thieves and you should stay home, or “just use common sense” and you’ll be fine. Neither helps when you’re standing in a bus station at 11pm with no signal and a guy who won’t take no for an answer.
Here’s what matters: getting this stuff right is cheap. Most of the tips below cost nothing or almost nothing. Getting it wrong is expensive in ways that compound. A stolen passport means days of embassy queues and rebooking fees. A scam means you’re short on rent for the rest of the trip. A bad taxi at night can cost you far more than the fare. I’ve travelled on roughly $30–40 a day for a decade across 67 countries. The reason I can keep doing that is that I’ve gotten good at not losing money to preventable problems. Safety isn’t a separate budget line. It’s the thing that keeps every other budget line intact.
And the counter-intuitive bit: the places I’ve felt least safe were rarely the ones other people warned me about. I’ve walked home at midnight in Tehran and felt fine. I’ve been followed in broad daylight in a European capital. Danger doesn’t read the guidebook.
Top 5 Tips
1. Split your money like you expect to lose some of it. Not “keep cash in a money belt” — actually split it. I carry four stashes: a decoy wallet with about $20 equivalent and an expired card, a money belt under my shirt with the bulk of my cash and my backup card, a small amount in my front pocket for the day, and an emergency $100 note hidden in my shoe or sewn into my bag lining. If someone takes the decoy, they get $20 and leave. If I lose my day cash, I’m annoyed, not stranded. I’ve been pickpocketed twice in ten years; both times the loss was under $30 and I was back at the hostel by dinner.
2. Photograph everything before you need it. Passport photo page, visa stamps, insurance policy number, bank’s emergency phone line, the back of your cards. Email them to yourself and store them offline on your phone. When my bag went missing in Lisbon, the embassy asked for my passport number and I had it in ninety seconds because I’d photographed it in a Bangkok hostel two months earlier. That one habit saved me a day of paperwork. Do it tonight, wherever you are. Takes four minutes.
3. Book your first night’s accommodation before you land, always. Not because hostels are dangerous — because arriving somewhere unfamiliar after a long bus or flight with no plan is when you make bad decisions. You take the taxi the driver offers instead of the one with a meter. You follow a guy who “knows a cheap place.” You pay too much because you’re exhausted. One night booked means you have an address, a direction, and a place to leave your bag while you figure out the rest. Costs the same as not booking it. Saves you from the 2am version of yourself.
4. Learn to say no before you learn anything else. In every language, the first phrase I learn is “no, thank you” — and the second is “I’m fine, thanks.” Not because I’m rude, but because a confident, immediate no is the single best defence against the persistent stranger, the overpriced taxi, the “free” tour that ends at a carpet shop. Practice it out loud before you go. The people who get targeted aren’t the ones who look scared; they’re the ones who hesitate, who look like they might be talked into something. A clear no, said while walking away, ends most situations before they start.
5. Tell someone your plan, even if it’s a stranger. I message my sister a one-liner every time I move cities: “In Oaxaca now, hostel name X, heading to San Cristóbal Tuesday.” Takes ten seconds. She doesn’t reply and doesn’t need to. But if something goes sideways, someone knows roughly where I was and when. If you don’t have a person, tell the hostel reception — “I’m doing the volcano hike tomorrow, back by 6pm.” It feels paranoid until the one time it isn’t. I’ve never needed a rescue. I’ve had two friends who did, and both times the fact that someone knew their route made a real difference.
Budget Breakdown
Real numbers, in US dollars, from my own trips. Your costs will vary by country but the categories don’t.
- Decoy wallet: $8–15. A cheap wallet from any market, stuffed with an expired card and a small note. Mine cost $6 in Hanoi.
- Money belt: $10–20. Buy the thin fabric kind that sits under your shirt. The bulky leather ones are obvious and uncomfortable and you’ll stop wearing them by week two.
- Travel insurance: roughly $3–6 per day depending on your age and coverage. I pay about $4/day for a policy that covers medical, theft, and trip interruption. In ten years I’ve claimed twice — once for a stolen laptop, once for a hospital visit in Peru — and both times it paid out more than I’d spent on premiums.
- Padlock: $5–10. For hostel lockers. Buy a decent combination lock, not the flimsy key kind.
- Emergency cash: $100 in a hidden spot. Not spent, ever, unless it’s an actual emergency. I’ve dipped into mine three times in ten years and replaced it every time.
- Backup phone or SIM: $20–40 for a cheap second phone or a local SIM in a second phone. Worth it if you’re travelling solo for more than a month.
- Doorstop or wedge alarm: $5–12. For solo travellers in cheap rooms with flimsy locks. A rubber doorstop costs $3 and works better than most hotel chains.
Total setup cost: under $100, once. Compare that to the cost of one stolen passport — replacement fees, emergency travel documents, rebooked flights, and days of your trip gone. The math isn’t close.
One Mistake to Avoid
I trusted a “helpful” stranger with my bag for thirty seconds in a train station in Italy. He was older, well-dressed, spoke English, offered to watch my backpack while I bought a ticket from the machine. I said yes. I turned my back. When I turned around, he was gone, and so was the bag — with my camera, my journal, and the only copy of a friend’s address I had. I spent the next six hours in a carabinieri office filling out forms in bad Italian.
The mistake wasn’t trusting him. It was that I’d let the social pressure of being polite override a rule I already knew: never hand your bag to a stranger, no matter how kind they seem. He counted on my politeness. Most scammers do. The fix is simple and it feels rude the first few times: keep your hand on your bag, say “no thanks, I’ve got it,” and move on. If someone is genuinely trying to help, they won’t be offended. If they’re offended, they weren’t helping.
I’ve since adopted a rule I call the two-second check. Before I set anything down, before I follow anyone anywhere, before I hand anything over, I pause for two seconds and ask: “If this goes wrong, what do I lose?” If the answer is more than I can afford, I don’t do it. Two seconds. That’s the whole system.
You don’t need to be fearless to travel solo. You need to be a little boring about the basics — split your cash, photograph your documents, book the first night, learn to say no, tell someone your plan — and then you get to be fearless about everything else. The world is mostly full of people who want to help you find the right bus. The trick is keeping your hand on your bag while they do it. So — where are you headed next, and have you booked that first night yet?