itch.io

"I do not really agree on the "dangerous, woman can't travel alone"-thing. As far as I know, Canada is a fairly save country, and people worry too much about this issues, thus restricting their freedom of movements more and more. While it's important to be careful (particularly, but not only as a woman), doing sightseeing alone shouldn't be and isn't really an issue, at last in the areas I've seen in the story so far. I also know enough examples of young women traveling alone exactly like this."

I will note that when I'm referring to the dangerous part, I'm not referring to the daily sightseeing itself. What I'm referring to are things like the late night walking around and going to hostels on your own. Yes, Canada is decently safe but that doesn't mean threats don't exist. It's just more rare for them to happen. I'm from the Toronto area that's used as Zinnia's first major destination, so I have familiarity with it. For example, I know that there have been occasional kidnappings, with women being picked up off the streets and then being sent off to other countries through illegal means to be sold as slaves. While these have happened more in the cities around Toronto than in it directly, the fact that it's a thing at all should say enough. I also know that, much like a lot of major cities in the US, that women can find themselves accosted by men if they don't have another man with them. These sorts of situations can very quickly become dangerous.

Now on the flip side of this, I've also had a cousin who has traveled across parts of Canada on her own and she's been lucky to be safe. However, she's also had incidents that could've ended a lot worse for her, like the time she was hitchhiking. She was supposed to be getting a ride to a service centre (these are stops every couple hundred kilometers along major freeways where you can get gas and food), but the driver took her past the service centre and directly to his house under the premise that she could get shower at his place. She, foolishly, accepted this. The only reason she was fine was because she was lucky enough to meet an actually trustworthy person. However, that could have easily turned south and my cousin could have disappeared.