Shakeemah Smith’s interest in travel started with a globe. As a child, she spent Saturdays in the public library, reading about places she hoped to visit one day. Yet, the woman behind the Instagram account @thepassportabuser could never have imagined then what she would go on to achieve. Today, Keem has traveled to 63 countries solo and created a hugely successful business helping others do the same. Having been featured in Forbes and Business Insider, created a course in solo travel for women, and amassed nearly 100,000 Instagram followers, Keem is most certainly living up to her childhood dreams.

Globe Trotter

While she has since become a certified globe trotter, Keem and her family did not have the opportunity to travel much when she was a child. With six children, her mother had her hands full and time was sparse. However, despite the lack of means for the family to actually go abroad, Keem’s mother did not lack imagination.

She bought her children a globe and encouraged them to examine it. She wanted them to learn about the world around them and ‘see where [they] could go’ one day. Thus, each month, Keem would choose a country and complete a sort of ‘book report’ on the chosen destination. On weekends, she roamed the children’s section of the library and parsed the pages of books about the country of the month.

Unexpected Adventure

Keem’s interest in travel was thus ‘peaked as a child,’ she says. She only lacked the actual experience of traveling. The first time she left the U.S, she was 25 years old and went on a group trip to Jamaica. Yet her entire relationship with travel changed during an ill-fated girls’ trip to Amsterdam. Abandoned by her travel companions after a falling out, she awoke alone in a hotel room on the morning of her birthday.

Despite returning home early, this experience proved to be a huge turning point in her life’s trajectory. Having been abandoned and consequently ‘run home’ once, she resolved never to do so again. ‘I needed to regain my strength and wanted to prove to myself that I could,’ she says. ‘The girl that evolved from that [experience] thought “you can’t just chicken out if somebody bails on you. If somebody leaves you, you can handle it”.’ Hitting this low point was thus the catalyst for Keem’s solo travel journey.

The first place she visited as a solo traveler was Paris. ‘I picked a place that I’d be so excited about that the excitement would tune out the fear,’ Keem says when asked about her decision to travel to Paris. She stayed there for two weeks, alone, also incorporating a daytrip to London. When she returned home, the pride she felt was overwhelming. ‘I did it!’ were the first words she spoke to her mother once reunited. ‘No one can take this accomplishment away from me.’

Travel Like a Bawse

The sense of empowerment Keem received from this solo trip, along with every subsequent one, inspired her to create a program that would help other female solo travelers. When she first made the decision to take the solo trip to Paris, she was prepared for anything. ‘I had a yellow-tab notebook and for everything I thought could go wrong, it had its own tab,’ she shares. The list took her 8 months to compile and included nearly everything she could possibly need, from what to do if her phone died to the route to the nearest hospital. She continued this system every time she took a solo trip, taking notes in every new country.

‘By the time I got to country 34, I had so many notes,’ Keem says. ‘Girls were reaching out to me on Instagram, asking how I was traveling to these places by myself.’ She was therefore struck with an idea of how to empower other women the way she’d empowered herself. Taking all she’d learned from her own travels, she compiled her notes into a power-point. She consequently began teaching solo travel for women over Zoom and in coffee shops.

Unbeknownst to Keem, one of her students was an employee for Forbes Magazine. She reached out to Keem to inform her that she wanted to write an article on her: after taking the solo travel course, the writer had traveled solo to three different countries for the first time. From there, the official ‘Travel Like a Bawse’ course was born. In the 9-week long course, Keem aims to help other women make the transition to solo travel, a task that can certainly seem daunting. ‘I provide them with a road-map,’ she says, ‘I figure everything out so that they don’t have to.’

Solo Travel for Women

When it comes to solo travel for women, Keem is a bona fide expert. She was generous enough to share with Beau Monde Traveler her top three countries for solo travelers and the undisputed number one spot goes to Antigua and Barbuda. Only 11 miles wide and 14 miles long, the entire country can be explored end-to-end in around 45 minutes.

‘It may sometimes be hard to tackle a solo trip because it feels like it’s just too much to conquer,’ Keem says. Yet when a whole country is smaller than the size of Brooklyn – as is the case with Antigua – it becomes less daunting. In fact, Keem loved the island so much that, after spending only three days there on her initial visit, she decided to make it her home. Within 60 days of her visit, she was a resident.

Another tropical destination that Keem recommends is Belize. Specifically, she advises solo travelers to visit Caye Caulker. The island is all sand, meaning that most people get around via golf cart. In Keem’s opinion, it’s the perfect place for any woman seeking to take their first solo trip for its calm energy and, of course, beautiful beaches.

For those ready for a bit of a bigger adventure, Keem’s top solo travel destinations are Bali, Indonesia and Thailand. ‘The people in these places are extremely hospitable,’ she says. Not to mention, the lifestyle afforded in both Bali and Thailand is cost effective. As Keem says, ‘you’re not likely to run into a lot of safety concerns on a beach in Phuket or a juice bar in Canggu, Bali’.

Challenges

Despite her success and status as an expert in solo travel for women, Keem acknowledges the challenges she’s faced on the way. ‘The biggest challenge for me was not listening to other people who hadn’t done it,’ she says. While there were people who good-naturedly expressed concern at Keem’s resolve to travel the globe by herself, she ultimately knew she had to follow her own path.

Some people in her life worried about her decision, uncertain what would happen to her on her travels. They wondered how she would be received and treated by people from cultures very different from her own. Yet, Keem says, you have to remember that to people in every part of the world other than your own, you would also be considered ‘those people out there’ with the unknown culture and customs. Safety is therefore always relative. ‘If God wanted me to be in one place, I’d be a tree,’ Keem repeats – a good motto for someone who has visited over sixty countries and shows no signs of stopping.

Keem’s story proves that sometimes, the best things come out of the worst circumstances. ‘None of this was planned,’ she reiterates. ‘I didn’t choose solo travel. Solo travel chose me.’ Thus, out of a less than ideal situation, something completely unexpected and yet wonderful emerged. ‘I did something that I had never done before one time,’ Keem shares, ‘and that led to a completely different lifestyle’.

Her top tip for anyone who is teetering on the ledge of doing something is just to do it. ‘You never know who you’ll be on the other side of your fear,’ she says. Her best advice is simply to imagine that person and then take every step possible in order to bring that person into existence.