Travelling to Greece alone, and never quite arriving alone

Solo travel has an image problem that does not survive much contact with a place like Delphi. The idea of a lone traveller, entirely self-sufficient, wandering ancient sites in contemplative silence, is a pleasant one, but it is not really how these places were designed to be experienced. Olympia was built for crowds of athletes and spectators; the theatre at Epidaurus was built to project a single voice to thousands of people at once. Travelling to Greece alone does not have to mean travelling through it alone, and a tour designed specifically around solo travellers is, if anything, closer to how these sites were meant to be met.

It is also, for many people, the reason a trip to Greece finally gets booked rather than endlessly postponed. The usual hesitations around travelling alone, an unfamiliar country, a language that does not use the Roman alphabet, the logistics of getting between an island and a mountain sanctuary without a car, are largely absorbed by the itinerary rather than left for one traveller to work out at a hotel reception desk.

What "solo" actually means here

Operators that specialise in solo travel are built around a specific and fairly simple idea: a group made entirely of people travelling on their own, none of whom is the odd one out, with itineraries and accommodation designed around single rooms rather than the usual single supplement that penalises anyone without a travelling companion. A week through Athens, Olympia and the Corinth coast, taking in the Acropolis, the ancient Olympic stadium and Mycenae's Lion Gate, works well as a first outing on this model: enough history to fill the days properly, and a small group to share the evenings with, without either element crowding out the other.

A longer route, for a second trip

For a longer, more ambitious solo trip, a route that crosses the Aegean rather than staying on the mainland links Greece's classical sites, Delphi, Mycenae, Epidaurus, with a run of stops on the Turkish coast: Kusadasi and the ruins at Ephesus, the battlefields of Gallipoli, the site of ancient Troy, and finally Istanbul, a city that straddles two continents by any reasonable definition. It is a considerably bigger undertaking than a week in the Peloponnese, and better suited to a traveller who has already found their feet on a shorter solo tour and wants the itinerary to match that confidence.

The part that surprises first-timers

What tends to surprise people trying a solo group tour for the first time is not the history, which most have some idea of in advance, but the company. A small group travelling this way for a fortnight or so develops its own rhythm fairly quickly: dinners that were meant to be quiet turning into the evening's main event, a shared joke about the coach's air conditioning, a genuine keenness to hear what everyone made of Delphi rather than politely waiting for the guide to move on. None of it requires performing sociability. It simply removes the one genuine drawback of solo travel, the total absence of anyone to turn to and say "look at that", and replaces it with people who are, by definition, in exactly the same position and glad of the company.

Why Greece suits it particularly well

Greece rewards this kind of travel more than most destinations, because so much of what makes it worth visiting is inherently collective: the ancient Games at Olympia, the mass pilgrimages to Delphi, the packed theatre at Epidaurus, even the modern island harbour at evening, full of people who have arrived by boat and are in no hurry to be anywhere else. A solo traveller standing alone at these sites gets the history. A small group of solo travellers standing there together gets something closer to what the sites were actually built for.