Three Solo Trips, One Carry-On: A Travel Diary

A Canadian Girl’s Year of Hawaii, the French Riviera, and Thailand

Yasemin Gunes via Pexels

It was the seat-belt sign that hooked me right away. Looking out from 31A on a 7:35am Air Canada flight to Honolulu, watching the lake disappear and the Greater Toronto sprawl shrink into the cloud, I realized this was the first time I had ever boarded a plane without a parent, a roommate, or a tour package waiting at the other end. Just me, a 40-litre carry-on, and a notebook with three flight numbers in it. Ooh, the year that followed!

I am 22, Canadian, and I spent the last twelve months turning a student-summer fund into three solo trips: Oahu in July, the French Riviera in October, and Thailand the following March. One carry-on. One small bank balance. Three completely different ways of being a young woman alone in the world. This is the diary I wish someone had handed me on my last day of second year.

Key Takeaways

• Three solo trips in one year is doable on a Canadian student budget if you plan it as one 24-month savings plan, not three separate holidays.
• Order matters. Hawaii first for the warm-up, the French Riviera for the city-walking confidence build, Thailand last for the longer, slower, friendlier stretch.
• Carry-on only saves you roughly $240 CAD in checked-bag fees across three trips and changes how you pack forever.
• Pick one cultural word per destination and learn it before you land. Malama in Oahu, flaner on the Riviera, sanuk in Thailand. They become your compass.
• Sort out staying reachable before you leave Pearson. Doing it in the airport is when the bad decisions start.

Trip 1: Oahu, Hawaii — the warm-up I almost talked myself out of

I picked Oahu because my best friend’s mom said it was the gentlest first solo trip a Canadian girl could take. She was right. Twelve days. A return Air Canada flight from Pearson to Daniel K. Inouye via Vancouver. A six-night stay at the Ohana Waikiki Malia (clean, walkable, $189 CAD a night when I booked in February) and three nights at a hostel in Haleiwa on the North Shore.

What I did not expect was how much the word malama — to care for — would actually rearrange my trip. The Hawaiian concept of caring for the land, the ocean, and the people you meet is folded into everything from the hotel’s tap-water filter to the volunteer beach clean-ups posted at the bus stops. I joined one on my second morning at Ala Moana Beach Park, picked up roughly two kilos of plastic in an hour, and was offered breakfast by a woman from Kailua whose daughter was studying at McGill. Solo travel works like this. You go alone. You eat with strangers.

Highlights I would do again:

• Diamond Head sunrise hike. Reserve the entry slot in advance on gostateparks.hawaii.gov; non-resident entry is $5 USD per person and the gate opens at 6am. The 1.2-kilometre climb takes about 45 minutes and the view across Waikiki at first light is what every postcard from Oahu is trying and failing to be.
• TheBus. Honolulu’s public bus is $3 USD a ride and goes everywhere a tourist needs. I did not rent a car once.
• A North Shore day. Hostel in Haleiwa, shave ice from Matsumoto’s (a 1951 family business still queuing out the door), a Ted’s Bakery chocolate-haupia pie for the bus ride back. Tip: bring cash for both.

Tip: book Diamond Head the day before, not the morning of.

Trip 2: The French Riviera — the confidence build

October. Reading week. I flew from Pearson to Nice Côte d’Azur via Frankfurt, eight nights, and treated the whole stretch as a city-walking training ground rather than a Mediterranean lounge. Ooh-la-la, the difference a pair of broken-in walking shoes makes!

Nice was my base. A €52-a-night room at Hôtel Villa Saint-Exupéry Beach (the Saint-Exupéry hostel chain has a private-room option that costs less than a Toronto Airbnb) put me a four-minute walk from the train station and a sixteen-minute walk from the Promenade des Anglais. From there the Riviera is one short-train ride away in any direction. The TER train from Nice-Ville to Monaco-Monte-Carlo costs about €4.90 one-way and runs every twenty minutes. To Èze-sur-Mer it is €3.10. To Antibes it is €5.10.

What surprised me:

• Solo dinners are normal here. No one looks twice at a young woman eating alone with a book at La Merenda or at a café table on Cours Saleya. The Riviera invented flâner (the act of strolling with intent) and it extends to eating.
• The Marché Cours Saleya flower-and-food market runs Tuesday to Sunday in Old Nice. €4 buys you enough socca (a chickpea pancake the Niçois have been making since the 19th century) to call it lunch.
• Èze village at the top of the hill takes a 75-minute uphill walk on the Sentier Frédéric Nietzsche from Èze-sur-Mer station. Free, beautiful, and the kind of thing you can only do solo without negotiating with anyone else’s knees.

I cried twice on the Riviera. Once on the train back from Monaco because I had just paid €18 for a small sandwich and once on the Promenade at sunset because I realized I was not lonely. I was alone, which is the better word for it.

Trip 3: Thailand — the long, slow, friendly one

I saved Thailand for last on purpose. By March I had two solo trips under my belt and I wanted somewhere that rewarded slowing down. Three weeks. Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Pai and back. A return Air Canada flight from Pearson via Vancouver and Tokyo Narita came to $1,612 CAD when I booked in November.

Thailand is where my carry-on philosophy paid for itself. Three weeks on the same five shirts, two pairs of cotton trousers, and a sundress that doubled as a temple cover-up. Laundry at a guesthouse runs about 50 baht per kilo (around $2 CAD), which means you wash mid-trip and you stop worrying.

What worked:

• Bangkok for four nights. Stay near a BTS Skytrain stop. I picked Phra Khanong (less touristy than Sukhumvit, same train line, half the price). The Skytrain is 17-62 baht per ride; the river ferry from Sathorn pier to Wat Arun is 16 baht. Cash is still king.
• The overnight train to Chiang Mai. Train 9, second-class sleeper, 941 baht (about $36 CAD) booked through 12go.asia three weeks ahead. Bring a hoodie, the carriage is freezing.
• Three nights in Pai. The minivan from Chiang Mai costs 200 baht and the road has 762 turns. I am not exaggerating. Take a motion-sickness tablet 30 minutes before you leave the bus station. Stay at a guesthouse with a hammock and write home.
• The cultural word: sanuk. The Thai idea that everything worth doing should have some fun in it. Once you notice it, every food cart, every long-tail boat captain, every monk at the temple gate is operating on it.

Have you ever noticed that the moment you stop trying to make a trip into an itinerary, the trip starts giving you the better stories? That was Pai for me.

Staying online across Canada and the rest of the route

Roughly 70 per cent of the planning stress for all three trips was about staying reachable. Mom expects a Sunday voice-note. The bank’s two-factor code needs a number that works. The hostel needs the booking confirmation to load before they hand you a key. None of that has to be hard.

Before you leave Pearson, sort out two things

Pull your phone bill up and check what your Canadian carrier charges for roaming. Rogers, Bell and Telus all run daily roam-add-ons that are perfectly fine for a long weekend but turn ugly on a three-week trip. Then decide if you want to keep paying that, or run an eSIM alongside your Canadian number so your texts still hit the home number and your data runs on a local plan. I went with the second option on all three trips. Before flying to Thailand, grab a travel eSIM with coverage on AIS — I used HelloRoam’s installable eSIM for the Bangkok-Chiang Mai-Pai stretch and it held up where the hostel Wi-Fi did not, including on the 762-turn minivan road into Pai. You install it from a QR code in about three minutes, your Canadian number stays live for the bank, and you stop hunting for a SIM kiosk at 1am in a new airport.

Coverage notes from the three trips:

Tip: screenshot your hostel’s address in the local script before you land. Your map app will still work, but the taxi driver’s eyes appreciate it.

What a year of solo travel actually costs a Canadian traveler

Twelve months. Three trips. One carry-on. Money math, all in CAD, including the flights, accommodation, transit, food and entry fees:

• Oahu, 12 days: $2,840
• French Riviera, 8 nights: $1,915
• Thailand, 21 days: $2,260

That comes to $7,015 CAD across the year. I covered roughly half from a campus job (Robarts Library circulation desk, hello), a third from a summer co-op stipend, and the rest from selling a bike I never rode and cancelling two subscriptions I had forgotten I owned. Solo travel does not require rich parents. It requires a plan and a willingness to eat dinner alone.

Ali Kazal via Pexels

FAQ

Is Hawaii a good first solo trip for a Canadian woman in her twenties? Yes. Oahu in particular is direct-flight-friendly from Toronto and Vancouver, English-speaking, walkable around Waikiki and Honolulu, and built around public transit. Twelve days is plenty for a first attempt and you will not need to rent a car.

How much should I budget for a week on the French Riviera as a student? A 7-to-8-night base in Nice using a hostel private room, regional TER trains for day trips, and one nicer dinner runs about $1,800-$2,000 CAD all in including the flight from Toronto. Cooking breakfast at the hostel kitchen knocks roughly $90 off that.

Is three weeks too long for a first solo trip to Thailand? Three weeks is the sweet spot. You need a full week just to adjust to the time zone and the heat, another to do Bangkok and Chiang Mai properly, and a third for Pai or the islands. Anything shorter and you will spend the whole trip in transit.

What do I actually do about my phone when I leave Canada? Two real options. Pay your Canadian carrier’s daily roaming add-on (fine for short trips, expensive for long ones), or install a travel eSIM that runs on local networks while your Canadian SIM stays in your phone for texts and two-factor codes. The second option is cheaper for any trip over a week.

What is the smartest order to do Hawaii, the French Riviera and Thailand if I want all three? Hawaii first as a warm-up (English, easy transit, gentle culture-shock curve). The French Riviera second to build city-walking and solo-dining confidence in a different language. Thailand last because it rewards the patience and the cultural openness the first two trips taught you.

Now, it’s your turn. Book the first flight. The other two will follow.

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