99 experiences
I stole this idea of including a list of 99 things that I want to experience during my RTW year of a few blogs that I have come across while preparing for our big trip, as I really liked the thought of listing things I want to do (I like lists a lot, although I am usually quite bad in following them) and ticking them off as we travel ahead.
Although preparing the list has allowed me to dream ahead and already travel in my head, so far I have only managed to come up with 82 entries out of the 99. I somehow never thought it would be difficult to come up with all 99, and probably once we actually take off I will be able to think of hundreds more, but as I do not want to include easy things like 'travel to Cuba', 'travel to Argentina', 'travel to....' - you get the picture - it has actually been quite difficult.
It seems like this post about the 99 experiences I wanted to have during my travel year somehow fell out of our blog without either of us noticing. Sorry about that. I just realised it now as I wanted to update the list with which of these things I have actually had the great pleasure to experience, and which have to wait for another trip :)
As you can see, I did manage to fill out the missing 17 experiences for a full list of 99! Hope you enjoy this updated read. I for sure enjoyed each of the 55 experiences that I can now tick of this list! And I'm looking forward to try to fit in the missing 44 in my next trips.
So, the 99 things (among others) that I want to experience during the 12 months of our RTW trip include:
- Learning Spanish in Latin America - YES (although I still need a lot more practice)
- Take a scuba diving certificate -YES, even three, Open Water (thanks to my lovely Geneva friends who gave me money as a goodbye gift for a cool experience), Advanced (thanks to the best mummy in the world and her lovely birthday gift) and Nitrox!
- Do a Malbec wine-tasting in Argentina - YES
- Volunteer (but only if meaningful and helpful work) - YES, in an orphanage in Guatemala where I worked for two weeks taking care of some 12 kids under the age of 6 mostly by myself. Lovely, difficult, love thirsting kids. Including 5 still in diapers. Very interesting, love filling and heart wrenching experience that left me in tears after the first day of working.
- Tango in Buenos Aires - YES, we even took a couple of classes
- Swim with dolphins - YES!!!!!
- Eat Mexican in Mexico
- Taste a new fruit - YES, several but my favourite was Luloin Cartagena, Colombia. Best fresh juice ever!!
- Watch a sunrise/set at the top of a volcano - ALMOST, as watching one overseeing a volcano
- Dance with a Salsero in Cuba - YES
- Learn Portuguese on the road from my main global travel partner
- Sleep in a hostel - eah, duh, what was I thinking here?
- Ride on an elephant - YES, in Livingstone, Zambia
- Pack my 4 wardrobes and loads of boxes into a 45 litres, maximum 12 kilos backpack – and live out of that for a year! YES
- Horseback ride on a beach - ALMOST as several horseback riding tours so far, including through a lake to a small island in Cuba, but none on a sand beach
- Take a several days long bike tour - YES, around Luang Prabang, Laos
- Travel in business class on a intercontinental flight
- Learn basic Bahasa – the Indonesian or Malaysian version
- Travel for an extended time – YES, 11 months in total
- Live on less than 30$ per day (accommodation, meals, local transportation and leisure included) for minimum 14 days non-stop - YES, my average in for example Nicaragua was about 18$ per day (however, as there were other countries, such as New Zealand, Australia and Brazil, where it was difficult to spend less than 100$ per day, the average for the full year came to around 50$ per day and person)
- Order a hair-cut without speaking the local language - No, as I haven't actually gotten a hair cut in some 18 months! Nuno however had a nice one in a small hole in the wall in Bangkok.
- Try a new brand of beer – YES, at least one per county. Favourites: Club Colombia and Beer Lao
- Learn how to play a song on a local instrument
- Taste a mango right off a tree
- Learn to cook Thai in Thailand
- Join a camel trek
- Stay on a floating island - YES
- Take a cooking class in Vietnam - YES
- Spend a night in a 5-star hotel at a heavily discounted rate
- Star as a Bollywood extra
- Visit 1/3rd of all countries in the world, or approx. 65 countries (counting 196 countries in the world). - Not quite yet as 54 visited so far, including 24 during this trip.
- Study a martial art
- Eat ‘real’ Japanese sushi
- See the Himalayas
- Go to a concert of a major local artist – but one that was previously unknown to me
- Sky dive - YES!!! Yes!! YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS! :D (thanks to my lovely mummy whose Christmas gift paid for this awsome experience, possibly against her will...)
- Do a random act of kindness to a stranger à la ‘pay it forward’. - YES, many small things, although nothing big enough to make a movie out of.
- Rhino walking safari- YES
- Couchsurf (as so far I have only tried couch hosting) – I tried a couple of times, but never got a positive response. Perhaps because we are not great planners, and hence only know where we're going next a couple of days ahead at the most.
- Write an article of interest for a newspaper - YES, although about Chamonix and not about the trip
- Hike to Machu Picchu - YES
- Join the carnival in Brazil - YES
- Try yoga in India
- Get a great massage – YES, in Ubud, Bali we treated ourselves to one of the best massages I've ever had. More than twice the price of the cheaper places in that city, it still only came down to around 12$ per person.
- Watch a water-puppet show in Hanoi
- Ride in a tuk-tuk - YES, in Guatemala, in Thailand...
- Bike around the Angkor Wat - YES
- Ride the death railway
- Float down the Mekong - YES, or rather up it
- Experience the wonders of Galapagos
- Hike through a jungle - YES, to get to the Lost City in Colombia
- Spend a night in a hammock - YES (same trek)
- Walk in the footsteps of a hobbit (but skip the fight with dark side) - YES
- Spend a night in a bamboo beach hut - YES
- Cuddle a koala - ALMOST, we didn't cuddle them but we were as close as we will ever be
- Live without electricity- YES
- Snorkel with sea lions - NO, but kayaking next to furry seals is a great second
- See a kangaroo jumping down the road – YES, although inside the zoo, but in an area where it jumped right across our path
- Pretend to be on the moon at the big salt lake Uyuni - YES
- Visit the world’s highest capital - YES
- Taste a caipi in Brazil - YES
- See live corals - YES, in Panama snorkling and in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines while diving
- Go for a spur of the moment trip to another country – YES, to Chile
- Ride with the gauchos in Argentina - YES
- Go without any make-up (read mascara) for 2 consecutive weeks – YES (or try months)
- Visit a country/place for each letter of the alphabet (A to Z baby, A to Z…) - ALMOST, but missing the letters D and Y from this trip. However, I have visited a country/place for each letter of the alphabet in my life.
- See a whale - no luck here as I always seem to be in whale spotting countries outside of whale spotting seasons. One day though, one day.
- Experience the immensity of giant turtles - not yet, but we did experience the incredible cuteness of their babies as they made their way from the nest to the sea
- Send a postcard per country visited to family – No :( It all started out well, with a post card per country from Cuba, Guatemala and Costa Rica. But when only the post cards from Cuba actually made it to their destinations I lost my motivation. One of my regrets.
- Drink a mojito in Cuba - YES
- Negotiate a very good deal in a local market - YES
- Taste some handmade chocolate in a place of origin for cacao - YES, in Nicaragua
- Take a picture that is good enough to get published
- Try the art of a local handicraft
- Learn to crawl - slowly getting there...
- Use facebook to get accommodation at least once - nope
- Write at least one chapter of a book
- See two of the world’s great waterfalls – YES; Iguazu and Victoria falls
- Manage to go minimum 10 meters either by windsurfing, kite-surfing or wake-boarding (so far I have never managed to go more than perhaps half a meter!)
- Sing karaoke solo and get an applause – YES, in Philippines, with Nathalie Imbruglia's 'Torn' chosen by a girl from the dive shop was and not at all for my voice...
- Spend a month as a vegetarian
- Do something really crazy – YES, I think bungy jumping fits right in here (thanks to my wonderful crazy travel partner globaltravellersnuno who gave me this experience for my birthday)
- Survive a 60km downhill biking experience next to lethal steep drops on a path better known as the Death Road – YES
- Dive or snorkel with whale sharks
- Snorkel with manta rays - YES
- Dive with turtles - YES
- See the Bourbour temple in Yogyakarta
- See a shark while diving - YES, several: thresher sharks when diving with nitrox in Malapascua (this was actually the main reason why we even took the nitrox course - funny you would say if you'd know that I used to have a shark phobia and I still have it for the big whites, for bull sharks and for tiger sharks, but I have accepted and come to admire the rest), white tipped and black tipped reef sharks, and bamboo sharks at Perhentian island, Malaysia.
- Make a road trip from Europe down to South Africa, with loads of stops on the way (new dream!)
- Experience the desert in Namibia
- See a leopard in the wild - not yet, as it seems that everyone else gets to see them except for me
- Hike up the Kilimanjaro
- Do a long barefoot run on a perfect beach - YES, in Rio and in New Zealand, the latter being my absolut dream place for beach running!
- See elephants bathing in Chobe national park, Botswana
- Travel like the locals - YES, travelling almost exclusively by 'chicken buses' in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, often as the only tourist; travelling in a small 'spider' boat - sitting hunched down in a tiny space for an hour until I couldn't feel my bum anymore - to get from Gili T to Lombok, and taking the slow public ferry from Lombok to Bali. And many other examples.
- See some lion cubs in the wild (as earlier I had only seen cubs in a lion reserve in South Africa, a cool place where I could even play with the cubs, but not the wild) - YES, in Kafue national park, Zambia
- Have an elephant charge at our car....AND get away! (Not an experience I would have really chosen to be among these 99, but it does still fit here somehow). - YES, in Kafue.
- Swim in a lake filled with hippos and crocos, although in a supposedly 'safe' part of the lake where the stream was too strong for crocos, while it was too shallow for hippos... supposedly... (again not really an experience I would have ever thought of adding to this list) - YES, in lake Kariba, Zambia
- Make friends with the cutest, sweetest little girls in the world. -YES, in Malapascua. These three girls showed up one day at our porch and were very happy when we gave them some paper and pens to draw and write with. They were great to chat with, spoke really good English as most people we met in the Philippines, loved to play and were really pleased when we invited them out for dinner including milkshakes and whatever they wanted to eat on our last evening. Worrying about them slightly ever since we left.
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