This is a blog about solo travel. Which means sometimes it's about the trip you almost didn't take. This is one of those.
A friend was supposed to come with me.
Two weeks out, they bailed.
And for about ten minutes, maybe a little longer if I’m being honest, I considered not going.
I’d booked the trip. I had the flights. I had a small island in the Caribbean waiting for me and absolutely nothing standing between me and it except my own brain doing what brains do when plans change last minute.
Is it weird to go alone? Will it be fun without someone to share it with? Should I just cancel?
A friend talked me out of the spiral. “Go anyway,” she said.
So I did.
Getting to Nevis is not like getting to most places. You fly into St Kitts, get on a bus, then get on a boat. And on that boat, they hand you rum punch.
Free rum punch.
I want to be very clear that by the time we arrived at the dock, I had made the most of that situation.
They walked us to our rooms. I walked into mine, slightly rum-punched, and stopped.
There was a birthday amenity waiting for me.
It wasn’t my birthday, nor had I planned this as my birthday trip. But it was coming up, and the resort knew (they had it on file from a stay at a previous property).
Sitting there on the table in the middle of the room, was a little early birthday celebration, just for me.
And I felt two things at exactly the same time.
Happy.
And a little bit sad.
It would have been really nice to have shared that moment with someone. To look at each other and go aww, that’s so nice. That’s the honest version of solo travel. Sometimes something good happens and your first instinct is to wish you had someone to share it with.
Before I let the sad take over, I put my togs on (bathers or swimmers for those of you that aren’t Kiwi) threw a dress overtop, and went down to the dock for sunset cocktails anyway.
And that’s where things got fun.
I started chatting to a few people from the boat ride over and somewhere between the first and second cocktail (that doesn’t include the boat rum punches), someone suggested jumping off the dock.
Was it a great idea? Sure! Until you see your boss walking towards the bar and you’re 2 or 5 or 9 rum punches in and you’re half naked doing cannonballs... But that’s a story for another time. I had fun. So who cares right?
So, me and my new boat friends took our dresses off and launched ourselves into the Caribbean.
Dives. Cannonballs. Backflips. Fully committing to whatever someone told us to do. It’s the kind of spontaneous thing that probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d been hanging out with a friend or syncing up with someone else’s energy.
I just... did it. Because I wanted to.
(and because rum punch)
The next morning I was mildly, justifiably, completely rum-punched-hangover-adjacent. So I did what any sane person would do, and I went on a half-day snorkelling tour on a catamaran, with an open bar.
And Turtles. And more rum punch. And Nemo!
And zero regrets.
I saw a couple of turtles in the water and I genuinely wanted to cry a little bit because it was so beautiful. No one to nudge. Just me and the turtles having a moment.
That afternoon I walked along the beach to a bar famous for one cocktail and one cocktail only.
The Killer Bee.
People will tell you one is enough.
People are correct.
I made sure I got it to go.
The rest of the trip looked like this: rain, a good dinner, an early night. A golf buggy borrowed from the resort. A solo lap of the golf course looking for monkeys.
I found the monkeys.
I didn’t get too close to the monkeys, they looked like they wanted to eat me.
But I found the monkeys.
I lay by the pool. I had more cocktails. I soaked up as much sun as I could before checkout and I quietly noted that I hadn’t needed a single thing I’d been worried about not having.
No one to check in with. No compromises. No waiting.
Just me, a small island, a birthday amenity I didn’t expect, and the slow realisation that somewhere between Sydney in 2008 and here, I had stopped needing a lifeline.
I’d become my own backup plan.
Outgrowing yourself doesn’t always come with fireworks. Sometimes it shows up on a dock in the Caribbean at sunset, slightly drunk on free rum punch, about to jump into the ocean in your togs.
Nobody was watching.
I jumped anyway.
Nobody's Watching You Eat is a blog about solo travel, solo dining, and all the things you figure out when the only person you have to answer to is yourself. Subscribe above so you don't miss the next one.