Hey everyone, so today we’re gonna talk about solo… female… travel in New Zealand…
I think I should take over this one. Hey team, I’m Laura, part of the team of
BackpackerGuide.NZ helping you plan an epic trip to New Zealand. As you can see we are
doing things a little differently in this video, because today I’m answering the question:
Can a girl travel alone in New Zealand? When browsing the Internet on anything to
do with travel, chances are you will come across the words: “solo female travel”,
which has become a bit of a buzz phrase of the backpacking community. Travel blogs, Pinterest
boards and Instgram accounts thrive off this theme, with the idea that solo female travel
is a scary thing yet a heroic accomplishment. With girls facing different dangers to what
guys face in some countries, there has clearly been a stigma against women travelling alone
for their own safety. But what about travelling alone in New Zealand? I’ll go through all
the facts and give you some solo female travel tips in this video!
Plus, if you are new here we release videos about New Zealand and host live Q&A sessions
every single week, so hit the subscribe button so don’t miss out. It’s Ok, I’ll wait…
Ok, let’s get into the video! First up, let me reassure you that solo female
travel is super common in New Zealand. If you’re thinking of travelling in New
Zealand alone, you are not the only one. Both males and females venture off to New Zealand
alone. No matter what country you are from, what your age is, whether you’re male or
female, if you are seen by yourself or are known to be “travelling alone”, people
will not look twice. You ain’t anything special! Except in your own little way.
In fact, travelling alone has become more of a trend in recent years. For example, Booking.com
found that 72% of American women travelled on their own in 2014. And more recently, the
term “solo female travel” on Google grew by 52% just between 2016 and 2017. And Pinterest
searches for the term “solo travel” has increased 600% in 2018! Even when Googling
travel blogs for New Zealand, you’ll see a wealth of blogs from solo travellers, especially
female bloggers – everyone is doing it! And guess what? I did it myself. I actually
arrived in New Zealand as a solo female traveler and it was the best decision of my life.
The next thing you need to remember about solo travel is that travelling alone doesn’t
mean you have to be alone. Ok, so you started the journey to New Zealand
by yourself, but that’s where being alone can end if you want it to. As we’ve just
discussed, there are many solo travellers in New Zealand, and you’ll find that most
of those travellers are open to making new friends with complete strangers. While some
backpackers take a trip together for just a day then never see each other again, others
will make friends for life! You can make so many different friendships here.
Meeting new people while travelling or on a working holiday in New Zealand is especially
easy, because there are so many ways of doing it! Just to list a few, you can: meet people
in backpacker hostels, travel on a bus tour or hop-on-hop-off bus,
join a backpacking Facebook group – I’ll link to our one in the description,
you can meet people through getting a job, doing some WWOOFing which is working for accommodation,
you can live in a house share with other people, join a working holiday program, and more!
Honestly, these are just some of the situations where you will meet people. You’re even
likely to make friends in the unlikeliest of places. That’s the beauty of travelling.
But for more details on these ways to meet people that I just gave you, check out the
link in the description below on How to Make Solo Travel a Non-Solo Experience.
Next up, let’s talk about staying safe when travelling alone.
The unnecessary fear of girls travelling alone has been heightened by high-profile violent
stories in the media of women who have been alone away from home. There are also incidents
in conservative countries where women who are alone stereotypically means they are promiscuous,
which can lead to sexual assault. New Zealand follows a western culture where
being a single woman is a pretty common thing. People travelling from different countries
to New Zealand tend to understand that too. In fact, New Zealand is one of the most liberal
countries in the world by being the first to allow women to vote in government elections
and has held three women in a powerful government positions simultaneously.
That said, it doesn’t mean you can throw caution to the wind and act all naively! Drunkenly
letting a group of dodgy strangers know where you’re staying or taking the creepy dark
alley route back home at night can be risky anywhere in the world. New Zealand is one
of the safest countries in the world to travel in so it is extremely rare to hear of backpackers
being attacked. However, where things get a little risky for
any type of traveler in New Zealand is when hitchhiking or simply the weather in some
of New Zealand’s more extreme environments, so make sure you wise up on those with our
guides to hitchhiking in New Zealand and outdoor safety in New Zealand both of which are linked
up in the description below. Finally, let’s discuss where to stay as
a female traveller. Where you stay as a female backpacker is a
personal choice. To stick to a limited budget, most female backpackers stay in hostels. Hostels
more commonly have mixed dorm rooms with both males and females sharing a room. However,
many hostels have a female-only dorm, should you prefer to stick with the girls. Plus,
in almost all hostels in New Zealand there are separate male and female toilet and shower
facilities. To see what it’s like to stay in a hostel,
check out our Beginner’s Guide to Staying in a Hostel video linked up in the cards and
in the description. And if hostels aren’t for you, then there are many great options
for accommodation in New Zealand while sticking to a budget, which we have another video on
so, again, it will be in the cards and in the description below!
So can a girl travel alone in New Zealand? Hell yes! The achievement of travelling alone
in New Zealand is certainly not defined by gender. The achievement comes from leaving
everything you know to explore unfamiliar territory – something a lot of us find pretty
scary to do. But once accomplished and once in New Zealand having the time of your life,
you’ll realise how incredibly easy it was. So that’s it for this video on solo female
travel in New Zealand, if you found it useful, show your support by giving this video a like
and leave your questions in the comments, I will be super happy to answer them for you.
One last link I’d like to share with you is our girls’ guide to backpacking in New
Zealand, which goes through some of the stuff you probably take for granted at home like
feminine products and birth control and how you can work all that out in New Zealand.
Or should I make that into a video too? Let me know what you think in the comments.
Until next time, happy travels!