A travel writer, which as much as I’d love to think I could one day be, I am not. I am a travel enthusiast, a scholar of the world, a budding gastronome of the exotic, and a lover of architecture that is older than my country. The aforementioned is but a small piece because what truly defines the experience of travelling abroad is the cultural exchange between you and the country’s inhabitants.

So…when I read an article written by a woman with the above byline, I have to take a step back to compose myself before opining on what can only be described as ‘shock value’ to get me to continue reading. Sadly, the shock value was a persistent theme throughout the piece. As any writer should do, I read up on the source with respect to travel writing. In a different piece, the author writes “I’d always been better with places than with people". I can’t imagine why?

The impetus driving me from couch potato to op-ed today is not to attack the author’s ability to write, just her credibility from making statements like "If being a woman traveler has taught me anything" and follow it up with some wisdom wholly unrelated to any of her experiences, at least those which she chooses to include, and based on harboring an irrational fear. In my opinion, she discredits her own perspective as a "travel" writer by excluding organic experiences with others based on their gender, which leaves me as a reader knowing that her writing is an opinion solely based on physical presence of a location and irrespective of the community living within it.

Hopefully, recognizing this will encourage women who may be swayed to believe otherwise by reading overly dramatized articles which lack encounters that validate her opinion. That is not to negate the possibility of anything bad befalling a woman (or man for that matter) travelling alone, but simply pointing out that traveling alone is no more of a risky proposition than walking down the street in your own neighborhood and being killed. [Last I checked, we still do that without the need to produce material instilling fear (of which one hasn't themselves experienced) into others more susceptible to shock value and less interested in fact checking.]