Did you feel safe?
I need to put a disclaimer on this that everyone’s feeling of “safe” is all relative to other things you have experienced. If you have never traveled in a developing country and are traveling alone whether male or female you may not like getting harassed by street vendors or locals 24/7. Some people may feel unsafe when street vendors do this, I just find it annoying and would like to be able to walk down the street in peace. I know they will not actually grab me or harm me, they just see that I am a foreigner and they want to feed their family. If you are in a huge tour group you will most likely feel safer however, safety in numbers. Traveling alone as a female, I never felt unsafe. But I was constantly aware of my surroundings and taking the proper precautions such as with clothing and making sure my bag and valuables were secure. I have also traveled a lot in developing countries in Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, so I feel like I have built up a tolerance as to what “feeling safe feels like”. My sister told me that everyone was asking her if I felt safe and she told them, “I’m sure she does, but that doesn’t mean that others would feel the same way.”
How should you dress as a female?
I dressed modestly and tried to cover up as much as possible. I did wear tight pants, because I saw that many local women my age also wore tight pants, but just made sure the skin was covered. The only times I wore tank tops were in tourist locations where there were only other foreigners and not locals. Even at one very touristic location but that had many locals tourists, I took off my loose long sleeve shirt for some photos and just had on a tank top and a scarf. Within minutes, I had a group of 20+ gawking teenage boys watching me and trying to ask me for a selfie with them. I walked away and later went to another more conspicuous spot and again within minutes, another group formed. I finally gave up. Did I feel like I was going to get physically hurt? No, I just did not like the feeling of the unwanted attention and felt inappropriate for showing my skin to boys that are not used to seeing women dress like this. It did make me question though how helpful it is to constantly cover up women, if the men are taught that if they see something that it is acceptable to gawk at it. If I did the same thing anywhere in Western countries, boys wouldn’t even bat an eye.