I'm @anielqa, and Solo Trip Ideas is just me. Despite the name, many of these journeys weren't taken alone. I traveled with friends, with family, and every so often on my own.

Yet each of them carried the quiet logic of a trip meant for one. Even in company, travel is a private experience. Two people can walk the same street and come home with entirely different cities, each remembering a different light, a different meal, a different turn in the road.

Traveling with others has its rewards, but it always comes with compromises: a shared pace, a shared plan, and days shaped around what everyone wants. On your own, every choice is yours, from where you wake up to how long you linger. That freedom is why every guide here is written for going alone, so you have what you need to go, whether or not anyone comes with you.

How this started

I've been traveling for as long as I can remember, and little by little it stopped feeling like a big undertaking. Distances stopped looking daunting, planning became second nature, and I learned to take whatever a trip brought my way in stride. In my early twenties came my first two great journeys, the Trans-Siberian railway to Mongolia and later Peru and Bolivia, and on both I kept a travel journal. In the years that followed, the trips kept coming, but the time to write them down never did. This site is my chance to finally return to the page and give those journeys their due: the practical details, and the moments that stayed with me. Mongolia remains unwritten for now, because a journey of that scale deserves a series rather than a single page.

So far the site holds 36 guides across 23 countries and territories, leaning heavily Caribbean, because that's where I keep returning.

@anielqa is the name I write under rather than my full legal name, and you won't find photographs of me here. I'd rather these guides be judged on their accuracy than on their author. What follows is how you can hold me to that.

What these guides are for

Read them less as itineraries than as invitations. The hotel I chose, the bar where I ended up, the boat I happened to catch: those are simply where my trips landed, and yours will land somewhere else. What I hope carries over is the idea of the place, and enough practical footing to try something a little further from the familiar than you'd usually choose. The fisherman's boat to Little Corn, a borrowed chair outside a Cartagena barbershop, a christening on Crete: none of them were in any plan.

What you can trust here

Every destination guide published here is drawn from a trip I actually took, and each one says so in the note at the end. Where I still have the details, I record the month, the number of nights, where I slept and how I got around. The ranked lists and the packing resource are editorial pages rather than dispatches from a single trip.

The My trip box is deliberately unadorned: when I went, how long I stayed, where I slept and how I got around. Those records anchor the first-person writing in each guide. When I don't have a detail I can stand behind, I leave it out rather than reconstruct it for the sake of a story.

I don't invent hotels, meals or conversations to make a page feel more intimate, and I don't pad a guide with detail I can't vouch for. The two ranked lists and the packing checklist carry no trip label, because that isn't what they are.

Anything that changes, whether safety, entry rules, fees or transport, is linked to its source: State Department and FCDO advisories, government portals, the operators themselves. Check it against the original rather than taking my word for it.

Safety in particular is never reduced to an adjective. Guides carry the current US State Department advisory level, the date it was issued and a link, instead of my impression of how safe a place felt. Where a country is rated region by region, Mexico especially, the guide quotes the state rather than the country, because the two can sit three levels apart.

Nothing here is written in exchange for payment. Where a place wasn't worth the journey, the guide says so.

What I can't tell you

Conditions shift faster than any blog can follow. Prices climb, ferries rewrite their schedules, advisory levels are revised midyear. Every guide carries a last-updated date, so treat it as a starting point and consult the official sources close to departure.

Finding your way around

Know where you're going? Search the guides. Don't? The trip matcher on the homepage narrows things by region and interest, and everything's filed by continent under destinations.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or something that's changed since I visited: [email protected]. If something here is wrong or has closed, tell me and I'll fix it.