I haven’t been writing and I haven’t been sharing any one-on-one special time with my laptop.
But what I have been doing is crossing many borders in Central America, surfing in different oceans and sailing the high seas.
I have also learnt some valuable lessons for budget surf travel and I now realise how hard it is to travel-write and travel at the same time.
I now believe that backpacking is a full time job, you always get charged extra on every form of transport for surfboards, WiFi is never reliable and that when things break it’s not always possible to get them fixed.
For the past 3 months I caught chicken buses, planes and boats from Mexico down to Panama with my brother Sam and Mexican boyfriend Javi.
Sharing dorms, breaking each others surfboards and making daily decisions all together isn’t always easy. We had a clash in culture, ages and strong personalities.
Although at times of quick decisions things sometimes got slightly heated, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to share these unique memories with the special men in my life. Even though Sam wanted to get drunk more than me and Javi hated dorm rooms, both issues made budget backpacking hard at times; but we made it work.
We explored the Maya ruins in Mexico, unpreparedly did an overnight volcano hike in Guatemala, danced on the waves in Nicaragua, searched for sloths in Costa Rica and camped on deserted islands in Panama.
We even managed to fit in a navigation from Miami to the Bahamas on a catamaran.
As collateral damage for all the good times, I’ve had troubles with ALL of my travel writing necessary items. That is 2 smashed phones (one broke during the navigation), a broken DSLR camera, a lost hard drive and a tiny notebook laptop that stopped working.
Along with my broken belongings, I’ve also had my heart broken when I lost friend.
When I travel life passes me by so slowly.
I live in a bubble where time has stopped still.
I forget to consider the world outside of my own. I forget that the days at home go by normally the same as when I left.
Everywhere I look I see new things; everyone I speak to I learn something about their country or that individual.
My other thoughts are occupied with where we are going to sleep for the night and where I can explore next. I am definitely not claiming travel is the road to self-discovery, but traveling does teach us to be considerate of other people and to accept cultures different to our own.
It opens our mind to far away worlds and teaches us that kindness goes a long way. The lessons learnt while on the road, are not ones that can be learnt through watching Netflix.
