On May 14, 2015, Gloria Apara—better known to her growing audience as Nomadic Chica—woke before sunrise in a rented casita on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. She had been travelling solo for fourteen months by then, and this stretch of coastline, with its sleepy fishing villages and empty beaches, had become a quiet anchor between longer journeys. That morning, like most, she did not reach for her phone first. Instead, she sat on the wooden porch, legs crossed, and watched the light shift from charcoal to rose over the water. It was a practice she had developed deliberately: ten minutes of stillness before the world demanded anything.
Gloria’s approach to solo travel has never been about ticking off landmarks. She calls it “slow expansion”—moving through places at a pace that allows the landscape, the smells, and the rhythm of daily life to settle into your bones. On this particular day, her only fixed plan was a late-afternoon cooking class with a local woman named Celia, whom she had met two days earlier at the market. The rest of the morning was open, and that openness was itself the point.
The Morning Ritual That Shaped Her Solo Journey
By 7:30 a.m. Gloria had already written three pages in her leather-bound journal. She uses a method she first read about in a small travel memoir years ago: freewriting without editing, letting the thoughts spill out until the inner critic goes quiet. It is not a diary of events, she told me later during a long Skype call from a café in Puerto Escondido, but a way to surface what the day really wants from you. On May 14, she noted a recurring theme—the tension between wanting to stay rooted somewhere and the pull of the next horizon. She did not try to resolve it. She simply wrote it down, then closed the notebook and went for a swim.
The beach was nearly empty. A fisherman hauled in a net a hundred metres away. Gloria waded in and floated on her back, letting the salt water hold her. She has spoken often about the importance of reconnecting with the body during solo travel—how easy it is to live entirely in the mind when you are alone. Swimming, walking barefoot, stretching on a yoga mat in the sand: these acts become anchors. She recommends that every solo traveler find one physical ritual that does not depend on Wi-Fi or a guidebook.
Mid-Morning: Local Encounters and the Art of Wandering
After her swim, Gloria walked into the village. She had no map, no list of sights. Her only rule was to follow sounds that intrigued her. That day, it was the thwack-thwack of a machete splitting coconuts behind a small tienda. She bought one, drank the water while standing in the shade of a mango tree, and struck up a conversation with the owner, a woman in her sixties named Yolanda. Within twenty minutes, Gloria had learned that Yolanda had never left Oaxaca, that she raised five children alone, and that her secret to making the best tlayudas in town was to grill the tortilla over a wood fire until it blistered. Gloria noted the technique in her journal—not just for the recipe, but as a reminder that authentic local knowledge rarely comes from a curated tour.
This is the kind of encounter that Gloria believes reshapes a solo traveler’s relationship with the world. When you travel alone, you are more open to these spontaneous exchanges. There is no companion to distract you or to negotiate with. You simply arrive, listen, and receive. It is a skill that grows with practice, and one she has written about extensively on her blog. For anyone beginning their own solo journey, she advises starting with a single morning of aimless wandering in a new neighbourhood—no phone maps, just curiosity.
The Afternoon: Learning Through the Senses
At 3:30 p.m. Gloria walked the ten minutes to Celia’s home, a painted concrete house with a courtyard full of hibiscus and a clay comal set over an open fire. The cooking class, which Celia advertises only by word of mouth, lasted nearly four hours. They made mole coloradito from scratch—toasting sesame seeds and dried chilies on the comal, grinding them with a volcanic stone metate, and stirring the paste into simmering chicken broth for over an hour. Gloria did not just take notes; she asked Celia about the significance of the dish in her family, about the festivals where it was served, about the grandmother who taught her the proportions. She later told me that understanding the story behind a dish is as important as the taste. It transforms eating into an act of cultural respect, not just consumption.
By the time the meal was ready, the sun had begun to sink. Gloria, Celia, and Celia’s teenage daughter ate together on the patio, scooping the mole into warm tortillas with their hands. They spoke in a mix of Spanish and English, laughing when Gloria mispronounced a word. After dinner, Celia gave her a small jar of the dried chilies they had used, tied with a piece of string. Gloria tucked it into her backpack next to her journal. It was the kind of souvenir that carries real meaning—not a mass-produced trinket, but a tangible link to a shared afternoon.
Evening Reflections: The Solo Traveler's Private Practice
Back at the casita, Gloria sat on the porch again, this time with a candle flickering beside her. She did not open her laptop. She reviewed the day in her mind, then wrote one sentence in her journal: “Today I learned that belonging is not a place—it is a willingness to be present wherever the light finds you.” She has a habit of distilling each day into a single insight, a practice she picked up from a Buddhist nun she once met on a bus in Thailand. It does not have to be profound, she says, but it must be honest. That sentence becomes a compass for the next day.
Before bed, she checked her email and found a message from a reader in Brazil who had just booked her first solo trip after following Gloria’s blog for six months. Gloria replied with a short note: “You already have everything you need. Trust the empty spaces.” It was 10:30 p.m. She turned off the phone, listened to the waves, and fell asleep.
That day—May 14, 2015—was not remarkable by conventional travel standards. There was no waterfall, no monument, no dramatic story to post on social media. Yet it is precisely this kind of day, Gloria argues, that reshapes a woman’s relationship with herself. The quiet mornings, the accidental conversations, the slow cooking, the single sentence of truth at the end of it all: these are the building blocks of a solo journey that transforms from the inside out.
For travelers who want to cultivate this kind of presence, Gloria often points back to the same foundational idea: ignore the itinerary that everyone else expects you to follow. I wrote about this very concept earlier in the year, in a post called Why Ignoring Everyone Else Is the First Step to a Real Solo Journey. Gloria’s approach is a living example of that philosophy. She does not chase destinations; she allows them to unfold around her. And in doing so, she proves that the most valuable travel memories are often the ones that cannot be photographed—only felt.
