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Tour groups are usually a no-no. These small communities with a schedule, unpredictable characters and a bus evoke in me a tightening of emotions similar to what I feel in an airport departure hall with its amalgamation of tears, fears and stress.

Except on guided tours the tears usually come from laughing too much, the fears from getting lost in an unknown city and the stress stems from finding the best restaurant that isn’t already packed for lunch because of its famous slices of original Sacher torte chocolate cakes.

Conventional group travel — where my time is not my own — is no cup of tea for a habitual loner on perpetually itchy feet, but I thought I’d give it a go. Just for a week.

As a traveler I savor solitude. So much so that I once left a traveling companion on the beaches of Dubrovnik when her loquaciousness on the subject of her sexual prowess – or lack thereof — proved more than I could bear.

So when I joined a pack of Indonesian women on tour in Slovakia, the effect was quite jostling for this lone wolf. After quiet days of traveling solo and speaking to only a smattering of souls, entering a city and conversation again took some getting accustomed to.

Holding a good conversation is similar to a long tennis rally. It flows. The ball doesn’t drop and the talk falls in elegant strokes. There isn’t the need to start over again with a serve (or a new topic) each time in order to keep momentum going. But after weeks of self-imposed solitude, with the extent of my conversation being, “Where is this train going to?” my conversational skills were no longer on the Nadal-Federer level they were when I was a journalist in Jakarta, bouncing the conversational ball effortlessly with dozens of people a day. This time, my returns kept hitting the net and dropping.

Tour groups are generally loud and being with a bus load of excitable ladies could likely do damage to one’s ears as they chat and cackle over children, chores, credit cards and consumer goods. Silence, I conceded, was not going to be on the tour bus’s repertoire this week. But it was hard to resist joining these fun-loving ladies in their babble as we shuttled around Europe, giving new meaning to the term “bus-setter” — breakfast in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, dinner in the Austrian cultural hot spot of Vienna and lunch somewhere in between.

Riding a tour bus is basically a compact commute through a country. Commonly crisscrossing a nation in less than a week, tours for Asians are as speedy as the turnaround of tables in a busy Chinese restaurant, more a sprint than a cross-country run. As we crossed borderless borders from Slovakia into Austria, we passed wind farms that resembled graceful snow-white ballerinas in a landscape of agricultural green and stout houses with sloping red tile roofs that ran rampant across Slavic suburbia.

We acknowledged statues of national heroes wearing military suits, standing proud in white stone, and envied the old men sleepily sitting on benches in the shade, the sun casting shadows on strong hawk-like noses. I found myself gazing at elderly women wearing over-the-knee skirts in pale colors over thick ankles, and wondering if they were prostitutes during the wars; if their dresses were shorter, in bolder colors, and if they, sporting slimmer ankles, enticed armies of men into their chambers.

Along the way, the click of our tourist cameras followed us as adamantly as a stubborn stray that shadows you home. We paused in front of beautiful objects because they were listed in the guidebook, not really seeing or absorbing what was there — a mere photo opportunity. In countless photographs, our beaming faces with dried lips from holding a smile too long remained the same. Only the backgrounds changed.

On tours, which in Europe tend to visit resplendent buildings of ages past, one is bound to learn new things, for the castles and palaces of the Continent hold riveting stories within their cracking stone walls and dried up moats. At Cerveny Kamen Castle in the Slovakian countryside, our young guide, Maciej, showed us a sealed air shaft. It was closed, he confided, after a thief clambered in like an upside down Santa one day and stole castle relics — royal bows and arrows that long ago aimed at the stags whose heads pepper the castle walls, and rusted spears and swords that once drew blood.

Then he led us down to copper cellars that took more than two decades to construct. They lay deep under the castle grounds with lofty ceilings, connected to the towers that had housed generations of sovereigns since the 13th century, where without wars and princes running down their shrouded snaking pathways, their cloaked dungeons and secret passages had long been forgotten.

The hush that fell within the echoing walls lasted but for a fleeting second before someone said, “Line up, ladies, photo op!”