In my country, women travelling solo is rather rare, not to mention solo abroad trip seems almost like a nightmare to them as we are raised in a rather overly conservative society, and barely we made it out of the era "being born inside and stay inside for the rest of the life without any sorts of enlightenment and die just like that..."
For some reason, I have always been a brave one, reckless if some may claim, regarding traveling solo inside the country too, when this country is anything but women-travel friendly.
You think I am exaggerating?
Here, in this country, if you go to travel another city and ask for a room in a hotel, NO ONE would be willing to casually provide you a room, just because you do not have any male CHAPERON and this is not the worst part.
And even if you insist on wanting one as you have already arrived at the destination after showing all sorts of identity cards and required documents to prove you are here for nothing but the reason of travelling, everyone around will treat you like a plausibly-call-girl.
That's right, not a slightest bit of untruth about it.
I did not consider Solo-India trip, particularly West-Bengal as much of a challenge, because I am well aware of their culture and most importantly we speak the same language, Bengali that is. And if anything, I believe Kolkata is far advanced and better in treating women like a unworthy-existent-shit than my country.
Also, India is so vast and culture wise, heritage wise are so rich, that I never really made plans on going somewhere else yet, at least until I travel to a couple of other regions of it. However, as both of the country's people are quite frequent to visit back and forth, sometimes there arise some unnecessary visa issues, like last time, when my plan was to visit Rajasthan, a rich place of heritage, culture, architecture of the Mughal Empire.
However, at that time, I was in extreme need to get away from all these chaos of life, to a journey somewhere else to be precise. I still cannot remember why I chose Vietnam, because even though that was not added in my bucket list, neither I laid and organized any plans to visit someday either, unlike Turkey, Greece or Egypt!
Even without a visa, the first thing I did was wake up one morning and bought a plane ticket to Ho-Chi-Minh and return ticket from Hanoi, only to realize "Shit!! I have not yet applied for a visa!".
I cannot say I am just going with the flow and making important decisions whimsically, however, even if it does, in my subconscious mind, I know that even if the decision was made sooner than expected, it is gonna be just fine even if it does not. Then I hurried back to study from Dr. Google and made somewhat of a plan.
I found it is rather difficult about Vietnam, to get information from google, not much of the information is available about the country's tourism on the internet and had to spend a lot of money unnecessarily later on in my trip for that.
However, I do not regret a thing regardless how messy the plan became upon morphing into the reality later on.
That trip could not be any more amazing than that I think, while I had zero clue about the culture, language, and everything from food to transportation.
Regardless, I found so much inspiration, passion for traveling solo more, love, and unexpected help and support.
I thank the whole of Vietnam for making my first ever international solo-trip (again India does not count XD!) so magnificent and appreciate all the kindness, help, and wishes I picked on the road.
All the contents are mine, until mentioned otherwise.