No Stress

Thousand words wouldn’t be enough to describe one second of this trip.

We started our day early in the morning, with all our batteries charged we made us ready for the most amazing trip so far. The school gave us 4000 escudos each for hotel, aluguer (taxi) and food. We didn’t even have a clue on how cool the hike were going to be. Everyone had high hopes but we all got blown away with the high mountains and the deep valleys. We took the ferry from Mindelo to the island Santo Antao and took an aluguer to the city, Ribiera Grande, where we were going to stay. Half of midship and portship stayed in Ribiera Grande and starship and the other half of midship stayed in another city called Ponta de Sol. We hiked in groups of four or more. Our group, Linnea Solfors, Agnes Werner, Svante, Simon and I went for the difficult one witch was about to take 8 hours. We hiked it on 3 hours so the information must have been wrong, but it was a tuff terrane so you had to stop if you wanted to see the view because when you walked you had to watch your steps. The hike was amazing, I really recommend to take the tuff ones, but the best thing with our hike was the end of it. We went through a village and as we walked between the houses there was children playing and goats sleeping. Some locals stopped us and asked how we were doing. People don’t speak so good English here in Cape Verde and its hard to know if you can talk French with them or not. Thats because they have so many creole languages, but the locals in this village spoke english fluid. They invited us as they made papaya candy. We stayed with them for almost an hour, discussed the differences between people in Sweden and the people who lives here. They also showed us how to make papaya candy, talked about schools, the villages, good hikes, snow and they taught us how they great each other. The best thing with the people here is that they actually live for the motto ”no stress”. Which is so different from what Swedes are used with. In the end of the visit one guy showed us the best hike you could walk on the island. He also offered to guide us one day, so we asked him if he could guide us tomorrow and he said yes. We continued walking and everyone had the biggest smiles on there faces. We couldn’t be more happy. As I am writing this, I cannot think of anything else than how happy I am to be here and make all these memories with the most amazing friends. Tomorrow we are going to hike with a local, a hike that wasn’t an option for us before. Isn’t that insane? We also have a contact on Cape Verde now, so students who will go to Cape Verde in the future can make the same trip.

We started our hike in a village called Corda and now we were at the end destination in Coculi. We took an aluguer back to our hotel, showered and went out for dinner. The food here isn’t that good so everyone ate pizza. Tired and full we went back to our hotell and slept, dreamed about the day ahead.

Ebba Axelsson Larsholt

Portship