If we are to believe the avalanche of statistics and stories coming our way, women are traveling more than ever –many of us are even doing it on our own, without the safety net of a package tour or friendly faces.

What compels us to abandon – even for a few days – our friends, family or home?

There are probably as many reasons we do this as there are women who travel.

Perhaps the stress of life and work has caught up with us and we need to put some distance between ourselves and our everyday existence. We may simply want to escape for a while and get some breathing space, if only to return refreshed and rejuvenated.

Some of us are cutting the ties that bind, taking on new challenges, new lives, new experiences. Or maybe we’re making up for lost years and missed opportunities, having put travel on hold while we built a career or a family. It may be the other way around – we may be just out of school, intent on not missing anything, not wanting any regrets later in life.

Travel is also a way of stretching our minds and spirits.

We may want to retrace Paolo Coelho’s El Camino to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, a two-month journey if you start in central Europe. Our pilgrimage may take us on the trail of the Bodhi tree or to the Wailing Wall.

We may just want to learn – a new skill, a new language or a new culture. How does Spanish in Sevilla sound? Perhaps you’re hankering for literature in London, baking in Bordeaux, safari photography in southern Africa or archaeology in Alexandria?

We may also want to give. As volunteers abroad, we may seek to share with others a small part of the good fortune we ourselves have experienced.

If we’ve been sedentary for years, we may look to travel as a way of getting back in touch with our bodies. You’ll have no choice: travel, especially the independent kind, will make you fit – it’s the inevitable outcome of lifting heavy backpacks, hiking up a mountain just for the view, swimming and snorkeling off a tropical island or walking around a newly-discovered city.

Somehow, without trying, I lost more than 20kg last time I hit the road. And, equally without trying, I gained it all back the moment I returned home and went back to my day job.

Maybe you’re already fit but the thrill of adventure keeps calling your name – an alligator-infested river to ford, a suspension bridge to conquer, a cliff face to tame… Or perhaps your taste for adventure stretches to ‘no-go’ zones, those parts of the world best watched on the nightly news. As a journalist, I did end up in places hit by war, drought or earthquakes – uncomfortable, at times terrifying, but always absolutely essential.

You might be a writer in disguise, with a secret wish to document what you see and hear or follow in the footsteps of women who have written before you. What we know today about many hidden corners of the world comes from women who did just that before you.

Some of us are or may become seekers, looking for something whose nature we don’t always know or understand. When I backpacked across Africa and Asia for nearly three years on my own, I started off as a writer, became a wanderer, and eventually became a seeker, looking deep inside myself for clues both about myself and about the world around me.

I’ve come to believe that somewhere buried deep within us is a layer of wanderlust, perhaps a genetic call back to the times when we had to move around to survive, the nomadic streak long since bred out of us by sedentary imperatives.

I know that I don’t travel because I want to – I do it because I need to. I have no choice in the matter. The world keeps calling my name, using any one of the reasons above as an excuse.

And I also know, deep down, that each time I come home, leaving again will only be a matter of time.

Leyla Ayse is a development professional and former journalist. She owns and operates the imaginative and offbeat website, Women on the Road, for women who love to travel on their own.