My Experience Backpacking Austria Solo: What I Really Thought of Vienna

Austria was one of the countries I visited during my first big solo backpacking trip around Europe, when I spent 80 days traveling entirely overland. I arrived in Vienna from Bratislava, and that probably couldn’t have been a worse combination for Vienna because I had just fallen completely in love with Slovakia’s much smaller capital.

Bratislava had felt easy. It was small, colorful, quiet and the kind of place where I could just wander around without thinking too much about where I was going. Vienna felt like the complete opposite. It was huge, busy and much more overwhelming than I expected, and my first few hours there were mostly spent getting lost and wondering why everything seemed so far away.

I didn’t hate the experience, but Vienna definitely wasn’t one of those places where I arrived and immediately thought, I love this city. What ended up making backpacking Austria memorable had much less to do with Vienna itself and much more to do with the people I met there.

My first impression of Vienna wasn’t great

I think this trip was when I really started figuring out what kind of places I naturally enjoy.

I had spent years assuming that the famous European capitals were obviously going to be the most exciting places to visit because those were the cities everybody talked about. But the more I traveled, the more I realized that I often preferred somewhere smaller, easier and less overwhelming.

Vienna made that very obvious.

I remember being shocked by how big everything felt after Bratislava. Even getting from the train station to my hostel turned into a whole mission because I kept getting lost, and by the time I arrived I was tired, annoyed and already not particularly impressed with the city.

The hostel didn’t help. It was dark, weird and barely had any Wi-Fi, which at the time felt like a pretty serious problem when you were backpacking alone and relying on the internet for almost everything.

So the beginning of Austria was not exactly promising.

The people I met completely changed the experience

The reason Vienna became fun was simple: I met people.

Two girls staying in my dorm, one Italian and one American, became my little group for the next few days. I had already spent a lot of time alone during that trip, so suddenly having people to explore with changed the entire mood of the city.

We didn’t spend our days desperately trying to see every famous attraction in Vienna. We went to a food market, walked around graffiti areas near the river, wandered through the city, got lost and somehow ended up going to the cinema together one night.

That movie night is actually one of the things I remember most clearly about Vienna, which probably tells you everything about the way I experienced the city.

It had nothing to do with Austria. We were just three travelers who had met a few hours earlier, sitting in a cinema laughing together as though we had been friends for much longer.

That was the part I loved.

Vienna made me realize I didn’t have to travel the way I was “supposed” to

I also remember not feeling particularly interested in running around seeing monuments just because they were famous.

We did visit some of the big places, but even then, what stayed with me wasn’t really the attraction itself. I remember wandering around enormous gardens, getting hungry and trying to work out how to get back out more than I remember caring about the palace we had gone there to see.

And more than ten years later, that actually makes perfect sense to me.

I’ve never been someone who loves a city simply because it has an impressive list of museums, palaces and historic buildings. I can appreciate that they’re important or beautiful without pretending they are automatically the part of traveling I enjoy most.

What I remember much more easily are the people I met, the random conversations, getting lost somewhere I hadn’t planned to go and the completely normal moments that somehow became part of the trip.

Vienna was probably one of the first places where I started understanding that.

The terrible hostel actually made the trip better

The hostel that I initially thought was going to make the whole stay miserable ended up helping create the opposite experience.

Because the Wi-Fi barely worked, people actually came out of their rooms. Travelers sat downstairs, had drinks and talked to each other instead of disappearing behind their phones.

It sounds incredibly normal now, but during a long solo trip, those little hostel communities could completely change a destination. You could arrive somewhere knowing absolutely nobody and have a group of people to spend the evening with a few hours later.

That was one of the things I loved about backpacking at the time. Solo travel gave me complete freedom, but it also constantly put me in situations where I met people I never would have crossed paths with otherwise.

Austria became one of those places for me.

Did I actually like Vienna?

This is where I think there’s a difference between enjoying a trip and loving a destination.

I had a great time in Vienna.

But Vienna itself was never one of my favorite cities.

It felt too big and overwhelming for me, particularly coming directly from Bratislava, and I never developed the same connection with it that I had with some of the smaller cities on that trip.

That doesn’t mean I think Vienna isn’t worth visiting. It obviously has an enormous amount to see, and plenty of people love exactly the things about it that didn’t particularly excite me.

It just wasn’t completely my kind of place.

And I think personal travel writing becomes fairly pointless if everybody pretends to fall in love with every destination they visit.

What Austria taught me about solo travel

The thing I remember most from Austria is how quickly a travel experience can change.

My first few hours in Vienna were terrible. I was overwhelmed, lost, unhappy with my hostel and already comparing the city unfavorably with Bratislava.

Then I met two people and suddenly I was having one of the most enjoyable parts of the trip.

Nothing about Vienna had changed. The city was still enormous. I was still staying in the same crappy hostel. I still wasn’t particularly interested in spending four days running between palaces.

My experience changed because the people around me changed.

That happened constantly when I traveled in hostels, and it’s one of the reasons I think solo travel can be much more social than people imagine. You’re alone when you arrive, but you rarely know who you’ll be spending the next day with.

Looking back at my backpacking trip to Austria now

When I think about Austria now, I don’t have some dramatic story about a country that completely changed my life or became one of my favorite places in Europe.

What I have is a very specific memory of one stage of my first major solo trip.

I remember arriving overwhelmed. I remember realizing that I was becoming much more drawn to smaller cities. I remember meeting two girls in a hostel and suddenly having people to share the next few days with. And I remember learning that a destination doesn’t have to become your favorite place for the trip itself to be worth remembering.

Austria was fun because of what happened there, not because I fell in love with Vienna.

And after all these years, I think that’s actually a much more interesting memory to have.