130 km hike on the High Coast Trail

In the last 2 weeks, I didn't have enough time to write down exactly what we did every day. So here is a summary. (And I'm sure no one wants to read 10 pages straight through.) On Sunday, September 4, I arrived in Stockholm and immediately took the train to Örnsköldsvik (Ovik). Markus and Max also got on the train, who had just arrived by plane from Germany. We booked a hostel in Ovik for the first night. When we arrived there, we explored the city a bit, went shopping, watched the ice hockey team during training, and had burgers for dinner. On Monday morning at 8, we started hiking. On the first day, we were still thinking, 'how are we going to hike so far with heavy backpacks??' But we quickly got used to them and by the end of the trip, I didn't find it heavy anymore. On the first day, we hiked 20 km (we never hiked that much in one stretch again). And our feet hurt a lot... It got even worse on the second day, but then our feet got used to it and the following days were actually really chill. In the evenings, we almost always found a really nice cabin where we could sleep. Some even had proper mattresses, blankets, and a small heater (all for free). Only twice did other people sleep in the cabin with us, otherwise we had everything to ourselves. And the cabins were always in a really beautiful environment, sometimes by a small forest lake, sometimes just 10 meters from the sea with a sandy beach, sometimes on the top of a mountain with a magnificent view. When you woke up in the morning, you felt like you were in paradise (except sometimes when you slept on the wooden floor and it was freezing). Sometimes we just had breakfast and then sat or lay down somewhere for 2 hours and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. Our daily routine looked like this: We woke up around 8 am (sometimes earlier, sometimes later). Then we had breakfast (usually porridge) (when we were on mountains, we always picked blueberries before breakfast :) and then we brushed our teeth by the lake or sea with a super nice view, which is much better than at home. On the last day of our hike, we treated ourselves to an apartment with running water (it only cost 5€). We all went out of habit to brush our teeth and afterwards we looked at each other wondering why we didn't just use the faucet? After washing dishes with grass and Baltic Sea water, we packed our backpacks and started marching. We didn't take many breaks, only a drink break after steep mountains and a lunch break where we always had bread, Nutella, salami, and cheese. Shopping was really uncomplicated because the three of us liked to eat the same things and afterwards we split the bill by 3. In the second week, on the second to last day of our hike, we didn't feel like having porridge and pasta anymore, so we only ate bread. Our shopping list for 2 days looked like this: 6x bread, 2x Nutella, 2x salami, 2x cheese, 4x apple, 2x chocolate. We ate that for 5 days, which was actually quite monotonous, but it was too complicated to cook porridge and pasta and wash all the dishes, and it didn't taste as good as bread. On average, we walked about 12 km per day. In the first week, there were often detours to viewpoints, where we left our big backpacks at the bottom and only hiked up with our small backpacks. So it wasn't so bad that I also had my small backpack with me. When we arrived at a new sleeping spot, we first looked for water and wood. In the first week, there were often shelters at the cabins where there was already wood, which only needed to be chopped or sawed. In the second week, we had to search for wood in the forest a few times, which I found much more interesting. Once, there was no wood in sight, so we just took some from the nearest house, because they had more than enough ;). We cooked our noodles (once we even had rice) on the fire every day, because we didn't have enough gas for that. Sometimes there was no drinking water at the cabins and there was no drinking water on the way there either. So in the evening, we cooked ourselves tea with the water available, because you can drink most water when you boil it. We learned that tea made from rainwater tastes good and tea made from Baltic Sea water is really disgusting. Then we sat by the campfire every evening and ate our chocolate. I actually thought that was the nicest part of these 2 weeks. Now, the last 2 evenings when we had Wi-Fi, everyone just played with their phone. But it's much nicer without internet by the campfire under the stars. At a few cabins, there were card games, so in the evenings, we always played 'Asshole' (a card game that probably has another name) . Then we sat by the campfire until it got too cold, the wood ran out, or we got tired. One evening was really spooky. We had a very small cabin in the middle of the woods and it was really foggy (so you couldn't see anything). We named the forest and the cabin 'Witch Forest' and 'Witch Cabin'. In the evening, we still had to go to the water source to wash the dishes and fetch water for breakfast. But the water source was 300m away and the path there was difficult in the darkness because we had to climb slippery rocks up and down. And because of the fog, the forest really looked like in a horror movie. We were really glad when we all arrived back at the cabin.

On the first evening, we saw the Northern Lights again :) I even found them more beautiful than in Norway, because they moved more, but unfortunately none of us had a good camera to take a photo. On the fourth day, we took a day off in Skuleskogen National Park. We spent the first night in a very beautiful cabin by a lake in the national park. In the cabin, we met Andi, who came from Bavaria just like Max and Markus. He had been here 2 years ago and showed us around the national park the next morning. At noon, we only carried our backpacks for 2 km to a nice cabin on the beach, where we chilled for the rest of the day and also washed our hair and dipped our t-shirts and socks in the water. I can't imagine that it helped much, but the good intention counts. In the second week, we all had a cold, so we couldn't smell anything anymore and we only saw other people rarely. The ones we saw were mostly German and a few Swedes. You can't imagine how nice and friendly Swedes are...you don't find that in Germany at all. Every Swede we met talked with us for about 15 minutes. We also got a ride twice. At our last accommodation, we thought there would be a store, but there wasn't, so we had absolutely nothing to eat. So we walked a bit through the town and asked the first person we saw where we could get something to eat. He went inside right away and wanted to give us a package of noodles and bread. Then his wife joined us and said she could drive us to the nearest supermarket. But it was 20 km away. And then the woman drove 40 km just for us. On Thursday, we arrived in Hornöberget. From there, we took the bus to Stockholm in the evening, where we arrived at 5:30 in the morning. Markus had been to Stockholm before and gave us a tour of the city. We didn't want to pay for a hotel for the night, so we took the boat to an island off Stockholm and camped there :). The island was really beautiful. On Saturday at 4:00 pm, we were back in Stockholm. We just went shopping, ate, and walked around the city until my bus to Oslo came again. These two weeks were really cool and I definitely want to do something like this again, because it doesn't cost much and you see a lot. And when you come back, you appreciate the little things, like a shower or a proper bed with a blanket. ;)

I will upload more photos later. At the moment, I don't have many.