The fear before the first step
When 24-year-old Ana from Portugal landed in India as part of her epic hitchhike from Lisbon to Australia, she was carrying more than a backpack. Warnings from well-meaning friends and strangers had stacked up — harassment, robbery, unwanted stares. So for her entire first month in the country, she quietly shelved the hitchhiking that defines her travel style and moved through India cautiously, keeping her guard up.
That kind of pre-trip anxiety is not unusual. Online forums, travel advisories and second-hand horror stories have a way of building a very specific picture of a place — one that is sometimes accurate, and sometimes a dramatic oversimplification of somewhere far more textured.
What she actually found on the road
With time, Ana started letting India in. She hitchhiked through Haryana, Punjab, Kashmir and Ladakh, capturing her interactions in a video she posted on Instagram. The clip is ordinary in the best way: someone dancing with her, another person bending down to help tie her shoelace. Small, unscripted moments.
Her caption was direct: "Everywhere I went, I kept meeting the kindest, funniest, and most helpful people. From strangers on the street randomly spending two hours helping me fix a phone issue, to making lifelong friends — the men I met completely changed my perspective."
She was equally direct about what she was not saying. "Obviously, I'm not saying it's 100% safe, that you can be careless, or minimising the experiences of other women. You should definitely take precautions, especially in the big cities. But don't let fear stop you from experiencing the beautiful energy of India."
The comment section reflected the same complexity. One Indian woman responded warmly but carefully: "Glad you met some of the good men in your journey, but what you have heard is not baseless — be careful and have the best experience here." Another commenter offered a theory about reciprocal energy, and Ana agreed, adding that her most uncomfortable hitchhiking experience so far had actually been in Georgia.
Why this matters for a solo travel audience in India
For solo travellers — especially women exploring India on their own — Ana's account sits in a complicated but useful middle ground. It neither dismisses genuine safety concerns nor lets those concerns become the whole story.
The practical takeaway is actually quite simple: precautions and openness are not opposites. Choosing safer modes of transport in unfamiliar cities, sharing your location, trusting your gut in specific situations — none of that has to coexist with a closed-off attitude toward every local interaction. Some of the richest experiences on the road come from exactly the kind of spontaneous help Ana describes: a stranger giving two hours of their afternoon to sort out a stranger's phone problem, for no reason other than that it seemed like the right thing to do.
Ana plans to spend the next year and a half hitchhiking across India and Nepal. Her journey is still unfolding — which means so is the story of what India looks like through the eyes of someone willing to stay curious about it.