The travel bug

Hello all!

Years later I finally start the blog I have been thinking about for ages. Initially it was going to be in Spanish, so forgive me for any possible mistakes I make in English, as it's not my first language (I would say mother tongue, but my mother tongue is also not my mother tongue). 

As you can see in my profile (well, maybe I've changed it by the time you read this post...) I decided to leave everything I had in Barcelona behind in March 2023, hop on a flight to Thailand with only a backpack and not look back. I wanted to experiment life to it's fullest, without any responsibilities and to just go wherever the wind took me. As you can probably imagine, this was not an easy decision. 

To put you into perspective, I'll give you some context about my life before that. I moved into a boarding school for top athletes at 14 years old, where I spent an average of 8 hours a day doing synchronized swimming (you know, the thing where you dance upside down in the water?). So I used to be a professional artistic swimmer until I was 19, and at 20 I started Medical School (yes, from one sect right into the next one). After moving out at 14 I didn't want to move back in with my parents, so I started working as a coach during my studies, and tried to balance work and uni for the next 6 years. Except for some setbacks, it worked out alright, and I normally could even afford to backpack Asia for a bit every summer. On a very tight budget, of course. 

Reading on a 17 hour long train in India. It was cheaper than a flight. 

That is when my passion for travelling was born. My first overseas travel (if you don't count the international competitions where I basically only saw the airport, hotel and swimming pool) was to Indonesia with my first boyfriend. We made aaaaalll the mistakes newbie backpackers make, and it wasn't at all an amazing aesthetic, great food and crazy parties in beautiful villas kind of experience*. But you learn from everything, right? It was still one of the best and most exciting things I have done to date. Anyway, as soon as I came back I started to fantasize about my next destination, where I would do everything differently, and it would all be even better. Spoiler: nothing went according to plan, but it was still a life-changing month travelling solo in Thailand. Once I got to a beautiful and still kind of untouched Pai, I met some beautiful human beings and got stuck there for the rest of my trip, almost 3 weeks. I don't regret it at all, I think it was the best month of my life, I learnt soooo many things about myself and the world around me, that I still apply to my day to day life 8 years lates. I'll write a post on that sometime. 

Some of my people in Pai. With some of them I spent weeks.

I had the greatest time. 

For now, I want to establish 3 things I learnt:

1. Time is a bitch and goes by way too fast. 
2. Make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails... Throw away the plan - Leonard Snart. I didn't learn that specific quote, but it sums up the point pretty well. 
3. Once you start travelling, you never finish. There is always more to see. Embrace it. 

Since then I've been to Japan, India, France, Italy, Sweden, Andorra, Switzerland, Bolivia, Morocco, Portugal, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and the list of places I still want to see keeps growing every day. Every fellow traveller you meet tells you about this new amazing spot they've been to and that you absolutely cannot miss, and they add up faster than you can cross them off the list gain. So please, if you're a fellow traveller, stop telling me about all the gorgeous places that I won't have time to visit even in 5 lifetimes (I'm kidding, please do, I love it). 

In a taxi in Nepal after deciding to throw away the plan and go somewhere completely different t
han initially intended, with people i met the day before. 

Sunrise hike in Sigirya, Sri Lanka.

In any case, this is the story of how my personal travel bug was born. I was sold pretty fast, and I've been trying to go back to it ever since, so recently I took it to the next level. Let's see how that goes, and how long it lasts - 6 months? 6 years? 60 years? Who knows. 

Lots of love, 

From a hostel on a beach in Sri Lanka.

*I would love to post some pictures from that trip, but my phone got stolen at the end and I didn't have an online backup.... So far for it not going to plan.