Gen Z Speaks: My first solo trip abroad showed me that travel is more than just tourist hot spots and Instagram pictures

At a campsite nestled between mountains, I stepped out of my tent and onto the wet grass, and looked up to see a million stars gently flickering in the midnight sky. 
I spent a good ten minutes craning my neck just to take in the sight — something I had never seen in urban Singapore. 
My breath turned to fog in the cool air. I listened to water cascading over rocks at a nearby stream, and I felt more peace than I had in years.
I admit that before chancing upon a tour package offered by a boutique travel agency, I had not even known Kyrgyzstan existed — let alone how to pronounce its name.
However the beautiful pictures on the website inspired me to do a little more research, which quickly convinced me to sign up for a trip there. 
Visiting a little-known Central Asian nation was nowhere on my list of priorities just a few months prior. Then, I was obsessed with finding a full-time job and jumping straight from graduation into the workforce. 
Holidays in general didn’t really appeal to me, either. Whenever I tagged along with friends and family on overseas trips, “travelling” just entailed visiting all the tourist hot spots and taking portraits of myself backdropped against landmarks that thousands of others have already posted about on social media before. 
It was never anything unique and certainly never inspired much soul-searching. It was simply uprooting myself from one place to another. 
It definitely didn’t seem worth spending thousands of dollars of my hard-earned internship money on flight tickets and accommodation. 
But after submitting my final-year project, I felt that I needed to celebrate this milestone. Seeing my peers plan their own graduation trips, I thought twice about starting my full-time contract so soon. 
I also realised that I’d never travelled anywhere on my own terms. It was always about blindly following my family’s and friends’ ideas.
I wanted to chart my own path for a change. 
And what better time to start than at the end of my education journey?
I joined a tour group with three other solo Singaporean travellers led by a Russian guide based in Kyrgyzstan. 
We spent 12 days exploring canyons, villages and cities. I rode on a horse by myself for the first time, and slid down a snow-capped mountain. 
I learnt much about Kyrgyzstan itself, and its fascinating mix of cultural influences. 
The country has strong historical links to Russia, so the Kyrgyz, who are a Turkic ethnic group, speak fluent Russian.
And yet, while some Kyrgyz look a bit more conventionally European with blonde-tinged hair and green eyes, their cuisine is decidedly Asian. 
Every restaurant sold manti, which look like larger versions of xiao long bao — Chinese steamed meat dumplings — except that they were cooked with mutton or beef instead of pork, with respect to the local population’s Muslim majority.
I learnt about the Dungans, Chinese Muslims who use a variety of Chinese that’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet — think Russian characters — and, unlike Mandarin, toneless. Their speech vaguely resembles Chinese, but a sentence in Dungan would leave me confused. 
For the first time, I realised that there is so much diversity within my race. Our ancestors are both members of the diaspora who left China generations ago, but we turned out to be distinctively different after many years spent assimilating into where we now live.
Spending days in the mountains instead of the building-infested cityscapes I was so used to was also an eye-opening experience. 
For two nights, instead of cushy hotel rooms, we rested in yurts, round tents made of felt and wood. We had no Internet access. Instead of whiling away evenings scrolling on our phones, we spent them playing card games and joking about Russian swear words. 
One night, we were staying in a guesthouse when a blackout struck, which happens often in the country. We could not charge our phones nor turn on any lights, so we had to light our dinner table with candles. 
This prompted us to improvise games like challenging one another to blow the candles to the point where the flames almost extinguished, but would leap back up again. Anyone who caused the fire to die lost the challenge. 
I had not felt that much joy doing something so “mindless” in a long while. 
Here in Singapore, it feels like every interaction needs to have a purpose. 
We schedule meetings to talk weeks in advance. Even when we do meet, we’re glued to our screens all the time.
In the name of efficiency, we talk over text messages and Zoom calls despite living no more than an hour apart. 
Sometimes we pretend to be occupied on phones just to avoid social interaction in public. 
Removing that digital reliance made me realise it had become more of a barrier than a safety blanket. 
Not a single day passed in Kyrgyzstan where I didn’t have several genuine conversations about everything under the sun — with people I had not even met before the trip — just because we could. 
Singapore is also sometimes called an “air-conditioned nation”. We can be so afraid of discomfort that we shun anything and everything even slightly outside of our comfort zones. 
But being in Kyrgyzstan opened my mind to the ways that different people live. Even a simple thing like going to the bathroom was so unfamiliar. 
Many village toilets were little more than sheds with holes in the ground, with no flushing systems. I had to squat while enduring the stench of other humans’ excrement wafting from below, attracting swarms of flies. 
On one toilet visit, I was even ambushed by a few bees that stung my hands and made me yelp in pain. 
To my surprise, a local brought me a partially sliced tomato to relieve the sting. To them it was perfectly mundane, but to me it was so peculiar — I had never before relied on organic remedies. 
The pain faded in a few hours — and with it, my hesitance to try more novel experiences.

This trip taught me that travel is not merely about showing off on Instagram. 
It is about pushing yourself beyond the familiar, connecting with people from backgrounds so vastly different from your own, and carving out space for quiet contemplation.
My Russian tour guide had left high school to hitchhike across continents. He was conversant in multiple languages, familiar with issues concerning various societies, and well-connected with friends from all over the globe.
In contrast, all I’d thought about at 18 was getting into university. That singular definition of “success” had been ingrained in me since childhood. Straying from that path had seemed unthinkable. 
But this trip has shown me that there is so much more to life than studying hard, accumulating wealth, and getting a Build-To-Order flat. What consumes my day-to-day reality in Singapore is a mere fraction of the experiences our wide world has to offer. 
I want to go paragliding in Switzerland. Talk to Filipinos who married their husbands in the far-flung Faroe Islands. Take part in a traditional art workshop in South Africa. 
Upon returning to Singapore, I purchased a world map and displayed it on my bedroom wall to remind myself of these dreams. 
By the age of 25 — which is in about two years — I aim to be able to name three facts about every nation, in hopes of one day visiting them and using that knowledge to connect with people there. 
It’s been more than two weeks since I left Kyrgyzstan, but even now, every night before going to sleep, I see one particular view in my mind’s eye: That starry night in the mountains. 
Our problems, our very beings are so small, but it’s up to each of us to make the most out of this tiny existence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eunice Sng, 23, is a journalist at TODAY.