stinafredrika.blogg.se -

Soooo. Here is my sticky and adorable last blog entry about this trip. Don't really know what to say. We have met so much people. Seen so many places. Hiked a lot of volcanoes. Walked many miles and spent endless hours on buses. We have grown. We have learnt a lot about ourselves and eachother. We have spent the last seven months together as a married couple (minus the sex) with shared bank accounts, shared beds and constant arguements but we have taken our friendship to a whole new level and there is nobody I would have rather done this trip with than Stina, my other half. We are the dream team and nobody does it better than we do. I have completed a few lists below but before that I want to make a few (probably going to be more than a few but "a few" looks good in writing and I see now that I am overusing it disturbingly much but I just don't care) shout outs to weird and/or amazing people we met on the way. Thank you all for being just as strange as us and giving us memories for life. One day we will travel your parts of the world and come knocking on your door. Until then, you are always welcome to Sweden and Stinas AMAZING island which she has been promoting the whole trip like a crazy person.

To Sofie and our norwegian besties, thank you so much for guiding two scared backpackers around your hood in Nairobi.
To Gil for encouragement and kindness and TAKI and inspiring me to learn the colours in hebrew
To Sara for giving us the best kickstart of our adventures in Central America
To Stefan and Stefanie, for being our first and most easy going company on this whole trip.
To Linnea and Tina, Team Sweden for life ❤
To Tyler and Dylan, for being "muy fucking bueno" without knowing any spanish except for 1-10.
To the one and only Carlos, for being the sweetest and most caring person to set foot on Utila.
To José (with family) for treating us to the most amazing luxury life all over Nicaragua.
To the Wildcard rough riders for being the most awesome crew to ever sail across the Caribbean ocean. You guys rock.
To Juan, Neeraj and Gregoris for making our experience at the Barraquilla carneval something extraordinary.
To Stefanie and Sanne for great friendship and bad poop jokes.
To Sasha and Vera for giving both a most anticipated relief from our horrible spanglish and a lot of laughs
To Tyler, with joy for the instant connection we felt with you but sadness when knowing we could not travel with you for longer.
And finally, to our friends and family for bearing (see what I did there Sanne) with us for the last seven months through late night calls on bad wifi. We love you so much.

Five annoying things we will not have to do any more

Throw toilet paper not in the toilet but in a bin next to it (or no toilet paper at all)
Sleep in too short beds in a dorm which is either too cold bc AC or too warm bc the fan sounds like an airplane (or there is none)
Watch out for the "deodorant ball" which comes FLYING out of it's hole spraying deodorant all over the place whenever we open it when we've been on a bus across the mountains (yes this is a real thing it happened at least five times)
Spend every other day on a 6 hour bus ride in a wet bikini with WAY TOO LOUD volume on the movie shown in the bus
Not being able to drink tap water and eating rice and beans and chicken every day for three months

Five things we will miss

Tacos. Obviously
Waking up next to the ocean
Not knowing where to go next or how to get there, which is a freedom in itself
Meeting amazing new people in every destination
The islands of the Caribbean. (See favourite spots)

Five favourite spots

Utila, Honduras (Underwater Vision of course)
San Blas Islands, Panama
Costeño Beach, Colombia
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Bocas del Toro, Panama

Five swedish things we have really missed

Chips with proper taste to a reasonable price (like not cheese & UNANNOUNCED LIME or chicken or other dead things)
Punctuality. The bus arrives in not five peruvian/colombian/bolivian minutes but five f*ing GERMAN minutes which basically is 4 minutes and 30 seconds, nothing more.
Blending in when walking down the street with a kånken and light hair...and noone stopping you to tell you you have AMAZING blue eyes, because everybody has blue eyes
Dark bread and cheese...and fika (no this is not three things it's one, stop being such a list-police it's my list shut up)
The way that women are actually treated like people and not like objects

Five tips for anyone doing this kind of trip

Travel light. You will be wearing your favourite shorts everyday anyways.
Plan it as you go. Don't book hostels, tours and tickets far ahead or online because 1. you will meet people and you will want to change your plans and 2. you save a lot of money by being able to bargain once you get there.
GO TO UTILA. It's an order.
Make sure you have a lot of time. Even if you travel quite fast as we did there is SO much to see and there will be a lot of time on buses and if you travel slow then, yeah. You get the point. (Also, take local buses whenever you can. Way cheaper and you get to experience the culture. Win win.)
Learn spanish. It will help you sigificantly when it comes to bargaining, booking tours, tickets, not getting tricked (also here watch out for fake calculators if you are changing money by borders) and generally getting to know people.