Every week, 9Travel shares a top travel tip from our readers or our writers. Have something to share? Email us at travel@nine.com.au for a chance to be featured in an upcoming story.

I can still recall the anticipation of dropping it off, waiting around a week, and returning to the shop, clutching my paper ticket.

It was something I did after every holiday, whether I’d been to the Costa Del Sol, Tenerife or Corfu (all popular beach spots for Brits in the 1990s).

I am, of course, talking about getting my photos developed.

For those born after 2000, let me explain. Before mobile phones were invented, you’d take a camera on holiday. One of those old ones you might have seen on the Antiques Roadshow, which used film.

Sometimes you’d buy a “disposable” one, which could only be used once so you didn’t ruin your real camera by spilling cocktails on it, or the like.

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And you’d gleefully spend your week snapping photos…. but only 24, because that’s how many one reel of film allowed.

The camera had a tiny viewfinder you had to squint through. And after you got home, you took that film to a shop to be developed.

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About a week later (getting the 24-hour turnaround was always too expensive) you’d be handed a thick wallet of photos.

You’d also get the negatives, which you’d need to carefully go through, holding only the edges, to find any shots you wanted to ‘blow up’ for your bedroom wall.

Then, you’d get to relive your holiday all over again via the glossy prints.

Sometimes though, they would come back with stickers slapped on them saying they were “overexposed”, which I always found pretty rude.

I recently dug some of those old photos out. My favourite was one of my mum and I with a pelican (I’d never seen one, okay) in front of a random old car in Cyprus circa 1993.

I even recall taking my holiday pics in to show my school teachers (geek!).

But taking photos on holiday and actually getting them printed out has gone the way of the postcard. Hardly anybody does it anymore (except, perhaps, 9Travel editor Kristine).

We just snap, upload some on social media to show off where we are, and forget the rest.

What to do instead

A few years ago I decided to pull my holiday pics off the internet and into real life – so, after every trip, I now make a photo book.

I create it online and it’s mailed to me, so I don’t even need to leave the house. And I now have a hardback book filled with photos from each of our trips over the past five or so years.

Every so often I’ll look at them.

They take me back to that time we saw the six toed cats at Ernest Hemingway’s house, or decided to stop outside Barry Manilow’s house in Palm Springs.

I just received my latest, and flicking through it takes me right back to the South African plains, for a brief moment.

They’re also great if you want to force people to look at your holiday photos, and I don’t think you can get that scrolling on Instagram.

Drop us an email with all your wisdom to travel@nine.com.au, and your tip could be featured in an upcoming story on 9Travel.

Last week, I travelled around Turkey (after they finally issued me that eVisa) in the company of three English people. We were all doing a small group tour, and as it turned out, we were all solo travellers, thrown together in the back of a minibus.

One was a retired dentist from London who had already taken 46 trips with this particular tour company and has been to just about everywhere you can think of. His wife is not as keen on travelling, so stays home while he gallivants around. It works for them.

Another was an almost retired accountant from London who was also very well-travelled. He had a plethora of stories about tropical parasites (don’t google botfly larvae, whatever you do), and has planned a trip a month for the next year.

And then there was the nurse from the south of England who was on her first ever solo trip at the ripe old age of 48.

As a first-time solo traveller, she was a bit nervous about how she would go. Her main concerns seemed to be about whether she would get along with her fellow travellers (she did), and whether she would miss having a buddy to have a sneaky gin and tonic with in the evening or dinner with if there were no organised meals on a given night (she didn’t).

It turns out her fears were thoroughly unfounded. The four of us — unlikely friends on paper — got along famously. We laughed our way around Turkey, sipped G&T’s in the long evenings, went shopping together, signed up for hot air ballooning together and helped one another when someone fell over (the retired dentist, not me for once).

My new nursing friend is not the first person to be spooked by travelling on their own. Whenever I post about my trips on Instagram, I get private messages from people telling me how brave I am to go on solo adventures and suggesting that they can’t imagine feeling confident enough to do it themselves.

So, I’m here to dispel the myth that you have to be brave to do this. You absolutely do not. You just have to have a plan. And you have to be prepared to enjoy it more than you could imagine.

The joys of travelling on your own are that you can do exactly what you want to do at any given time.

If you want to sleep in one day, you can, without upsetting someone who wants to get up and about at sunrise. If you want to sit in a cafe watching the world go by for half the day, rather than traipse around a motorcycle museum, you absolutely can. If you want to eat baklava in bed instead of going out to dinner, oh boy, can you. You are utterly free to do whatever you want which is a very liberating feeling.

But similarly, if you are the sort of person who likes the company of other people, there are so many ways to achieve it, even when travelling solo. Small group tours have been an amazing way for me to connect with fellow like-minded people and have the safety of a tour leader with some inside knowledge, especially when I’m going to a place I’ve never been to before, or where there’s a significant language barrier.

When I’m not with a tour group, though, I like to seek out activities to keep me busy and to have the opportunity to meet and chat to other people. In Istanbul, I did a food tour where it turned out I was the only person on the tour, so I got a private experience where my guide took me to a bunch of her favourite spots and by the end of it, we felt like old friends. I also signed up for a perfume making workshop because, why not?

In Vietnam, I did a leatherwork class where I made my own coin purse, and a lantern making workshop. In a small town in Italy, I went on an ebike tour of the surrounding countryside.

In Florence, I learned how to appreciate aperitivo hour and in LA, I toured the Farmers Market with an enthusiastic woman named Jodie who loudly proclaimed to every vendor that “NATALIE’S ON THE RADIO” which was both mortifying and hilarious.

The reality is that if I was travelling with a group of friends, I never would have done any of these things because there’s no way we could have all agreed on any given activity.

Travelling solo forces you to try new things, to smile at strangers, to ask for directions, and to do whatever the hell you want. And I really, really like it.

Now excuse me, but I’m off to a Turkish bath house, because I can.