How Bangladesh’s female solo travellers are claiming the road
Bangladeshi women are travelling alone, at home and abroad, and being asked to explain themselves at every checkpoint. Some are building spaces of their own. A few are taking the question to court
Two months ago, on a full-moon night in Lama, Bandarban, Maisha Tasnim Sneha stood on a hill with a group of women. Below them, the Matamuhuri River wound between the hills. Insects chirped in the dark.
It is the kind of night she now builds trips around. Maisha discovered a particular freedom in travelling alone: moving through the world without first having to negotiate its rules. She wants other women to experience it too.
"Growing up, we were constantly told that going out is not safe," she said. "We were made to understand that girls going outside was somehow the problem. I never really accepted that idea. But travelling alone gave me the chance to experience practically how that blame is so wrong."
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Travelling solo is the culmination of a lifelong love she has had for travelling. At university, she began exploring Bangladesh. Her first trip abroad, to Nepal, was in 2023. Meghalaya and Ladakh followed, then Thailand and Sri Lanka with friends, and later solo trips to Nepal and Kenya.
Maisha grew up in Dhaka believing the world was harsh and hostile. The road taught her otherwise: to trust people and herself.
"I have been completely alone and vulnerable in places where I did not know anyone, and yet I never felt unsafe," she said. "That really taught me something: going outside is never the problem. If something happens to me, it is because men choose to behave badly. There is no way I can ever blame myself for something that happens to me."
Once, her phone stopped working for several days during a solo trip. She found her way around and sorted out the problem without falling apart.
"I handled the problems, and nothing terrible happened," she said. "That gave me confidence that, whatever happens, I have the capacity to deal with it."
Abroad, she travelled without much of a plan, striking up conversations with strangers and following whatever seemed promising. She stayed in hostels she had never heard of, walked alone at odd hours and asked strangers for lifts without constantly wondering whether they might take advantage of her.
Bangladesh was different. At home, travel involved more calculation: scrutinising the quality of hotels, bracing to be overcharged for transport or food, and wondering how strangers would treat her, especially in places unaccustomed to tourists.
Near Jaintiapur in Sylhet, local men at a waterfall grew nosy, asking why the young women had come and whether Maisha was married. At bus checkpoints, officials asked whether her parents knew she was travelling. She was asked the same question on the journey from Bandarban to Dhaka and again at airport immigration.
"It makes you realise that they are not seeing you simply as another person. They are seeing you first as an object of desire which has no autonomy," Maisha said.
That experience led her to start a small women's travel group, where women could find companions and feel less self-conscious.
"The only way to find space for women to travel is to claim that space. No one is going to simply give it to you."
She is far from alone. More women in Bangladesh are travelling on their own, and one of the best-known is solo female travel content creator Shurovy Yeasmin, who has travelled extensively across the country and abroad.
Shurovy started travelling at around 19, during her first year at university, and began going solo a few years later. She has since visited many parts of Bangladesh and 12 countries, nine of them alone.
To her, country roads have felt safer than Dhaka. She recalls being harassed on public buses on her way to university, yet says she has rarely encountered the same behaviour in the places she has visited. In tourist areas, she says, local people and professional guides are not necessarily the people women need to be wary of. Sometimes, the discomfort comes from closer to home: the people they travel with.
"If you face harassment there, surprisingly, it would be more likely to come from the person you travelled with," she said. She believes that, regardless of gender, a travel companion may be the person to watch most carefully. It is one reason she prefers to travel alone.
Solo travel does not mean being careless. Shurovy says she has learnt to read people through their faces, body language and the way they speak. She seeks help from the authorities when necessary and rarely travels alone after dark. Nor does she believe that leaving Bangladesh means leaving risk behind.
Of all the places she has visited in Bangladesh, Rangamati is where she has felt safest. One winter several years ago, she arrived at around 4am, when almost no one was around, and took a CNG to her hotel. The receptionist did not answer the phone, so the driver stayed with her for about an hour and a half while she tried to sort out her accommodation.
"I have been to Rangamati 10 or 12 times. Never have I felt that people were looking at me like I was some strange creature because of my clothes or because I was a woman. Every time I feel like this, this is my place. And that is only because the people made me feel that way."
Travel became part of Shurovy's identity and eventually the basis of a career.
For Jhumka Chakma, however, travel also raises questions about the impact visitors leave behind.
Jhumka, who is from Khagrachhari, has travelled across Bangladesh and is currently travelling solo through Northeast India. She began travelling around 2016–17, first with friends and travel groups, then by hosting trips herself and going alone. She also worked as a moderator and host for travel groups, but over time grew uneasy with how some of them approached the hills.
"There were certain things that conflicted with my ethics," she said. "There is a difference between travelling to the hills and turning the hills into a business."
She had seen groups use nature as a selling point while taking part in tourism that pollutes the environment and disturbs local people's peace and privacy. Some travellers are aware of this, Jhumka said.
Maisha and Shurovy also spoke about being conscious of their impact, but not every traveller is. Few rules govern visitors' behaviour in such places, leaving local people's privacy vulnerable to breaches. Nor does every group teach its customers basic etiquette or respect for boundaries.
So Jhumka left those groups and started a small platform of her own, bringing together people willing to travel without making those compromises.
She has travelled through many of the country's districts and, like the others, has experienced unwanted incidents. Yet when asked where she felt safest in Bangladesh, she named North Bengal.
"Wherever I have gone, I have somehow had to face some kind of teasing or unwanted behaviour from people. But my experiences in North Bengal were different. I don't think I have ever had such a peaceful travel experience anywhere."
In Thakurgaon, Dinajpur and Panchagarh, she said, people were curious about her as an Indigenous traveller, sometimes gathering simply because they had never seen a Chakma person before. The curiosity came with warmth, not harassment.
Travel has also changed how she sees the world. She learns by observing different people, cultures and ways of life, taking what she finds valuable and adapting it for herself. The biggest shift, she says, was learning to look beyond her own perspective.
Their stories come as women-only travel becomes a more visible part of the global tourism industry. Intrepid Travel says women now make up over half of its travellers, and its Women's Expedition range grew by 32% in 2025. Some 77% of those travellers joined trips solo. The range now includes destinations in Muslim-majority countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Pakistan.
In Bangladesh, however, the trend is harder to quantify. A 2022 study of 307 Bangladeshi solo travellers described the travel habits of Asian Muslim women as "sorely under-researched".
Online, though, women-only travel communities have built sizeable followings. As of 30 September 2026, Wander Woman had around 142,000 followers, The Female Travellers Network 108,000, and Vromonkonna 104,000. Those numbers point to growing demand for spaces where women can find companions, swap information and travel on their own terms.
Some of these communities have gone beyond organising tours. Vromonkonna runs five other travel-centred projects. According to its own figures, it has served more than 4,800 women, held over 300 events and run more than 10 skills programmes. These include cycling, driving, swimming and self-defence, all skills that can make independent travel easier.
But the stories of Maisha, Shurovy and Jhumka show that women-only travel is more than a growing market. For them, travel is a way of questioning the boundaries they grew up with and creating spaces from which women have long been shut out.
As Maisha put it, "If enough women travel, this will slowly become normalised, and businesses catering to female travellers, like women-only hostels, will start growing."
In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit explored how women moving alone through public space have historically been treated as though they must justify their presence. The questions are familiar: Where are you going? Who are you with? Where is your husband? Why are you here alone?
Sometimes, women are asked such questions outright. Farhana Farha, a community curator at Cinemata, was detained by immigration officials at the airport before a work trip to the Philippines. They questioned her decision to travel abroad alone, saying they were concerned for her safety.
Hers is not an isolated case. On 8 August 2026, three adult women — Rifa Tamanna, Sohani Islam Samapti and Naznin — went to Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport to fly to Nepal. They had valid passports and travel documents and faced no criminal cases or court orders restricting their travel.
According to their lawyer, they were asked why they were unmarried and whether their families had consented to the trip, then stopped without being given a reason. They lost money on their tickets and other bookings.
On 29 September, the High Court issued a rule asking why the decision to stop them from travelling should not be declared illegal. The case is pending, and the authorities have been given four weeks to respond.
Farhana and Maisha had faced similar questions. Every woman in this story described a version of the same pressure. Still, they kept travelling within the country and beyond it, each for her own reasons. Perhaps that resonates with what Sylvia Plath wrote about decades ago: the desire "to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night."
And when boundaries become barriers, some women are willing to push back, all the way to the courts.
