This is my ultimate vibes mixtape that I'm constantly updating. These songs range from old to new, spanning from electronic to rock, and might seem like they wouldn't belong in the same list at all. The common thread here is that they have somehow entered my radar and affected me, thus creating the ultimate vibes for me. Now, I'm hoping to spread the love to you.

I was out at a bar with a friend of mine. It was 4 AM, and someone put this gem on. Somehow, it had never registered on my radar before, which made that discovery even sweeter. This is the vibe.

There's just something special about Milky Chance covers. I want to put this song on and drive to the sunset.

I could put an entire discography of Fred Again here as he's my absolute favourite. Lately I've discovered this gem of his. It really flew under the radar because it wasn't on any of his LPs.

This was played to me while I was in Hamburg in 2018. What a great memory.

For this one we have to thank the YouTube algorithm. I was intrigued by the video as well.

Like I said - ultimate vibes!

I like this live version much better than the real one. There's something special they captured with it.

This is a prime example of great YouTube comment section. You read about all those different people in a wide variety of life situations vibing to the same song. 

Jamie XX is one of the best. This one in particular hits all the vibes.

I've been to Alt-j live two times now and they've never played this one. Still hoping that day will come.

Where did the idea of building a social networking platform come from? How does one make an app that attracts a billion users? Why would anyone in their right mind go against giants like Musk or Zuck? Before going into the story behind Swipekick, perhaps you'd like to watch a movie about it first. It took me an entire year to make this film! That being said, this feed isn’t a repetition of the story. I tried to use both mediums to provide a little extra something for this story.

Creating a social networking platform wasn’t the initial plan at all. The story begins so far back that I’m not even entirely sure of the year, but I’m 87% sure it was 2016. Nonetheless, I remember sitting in front of a fireplace at a summer cabin when the idea of a new kind of to-do app came about. For some reason, I believed that if a to-do list was public and had a social sharing aspect, perhaps people, including myself, would feel a greater sense of responsibility and motivation to complete tasks. I was hyped.

Back then, I knew nothing about UI design and even less about coding. However, I was so deep into filmmaking at film school that I thought to myself, "Hey! I know visuals. How hard can it be to design an app?" So, I discovered Sketch - the leading UI design app of that time - and learned it. Once I started playing around with shapes that formed the user interface, and could preview them on my phone, I felt literal butterflies in my stomach. It was that cool.

Although I was dabbling with design, I still didn’t know how to code. Fortunately, I knew Sander, who had just recently started studying computer science at university. So I reached out to him, and we met to discuss the idea. He was in, fortunately. This is a guy who is not only extremely smart, but also musically talented. In fact, while pursuing his CS degree, he was also pursuing a musical education. Not only was he involved in numerous bands, but he was also active in university coding events, competitions, and already working as a part-time software engineer – all with an ease and a smile on his face.

In the early days, our focus was solely on developing a mobile app. If I’m not mistaken, initially Sander tried Xamarin and hybrid write-once-run-everywhere solutions. That wasn’t too pleasant, and at a certain point, we opted to go iOS-only. After many unsuccessful tries of getting Hackintosh running on his computer (I remember we literally tried adjusting specific low-level system files), we understood that we can’t get around of getting a Mac. Fortunately, we were able to get an older MacBook from the sister of a girlfriend of mine back then, and that thing ran perfectly. Except for the extremely bulged battery that was nearly exploding. Now, everything left to do was to actually code the darn thing. The only issue was that Sander had never written an iOS app or Swift before (it might’ve still been Objective-C back then, not sure), but with some use of his dark powers, he was able to bring the views to life. This is when Sander first said that: “In IT, anything’s possible”. Once we saw it on the phone (btw, we had only one iPhone between the two of us), it was exhilarating. It’s a real thing!

I also remember creating the logo in 15 minutes. I had recently read "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton, which tells the crazy story of how Twitter came to be. I then somehow stumbled upon the new Twitter logo, the flat blue bird, and read that it was created from only circles. Naturally, I was very inspired by it and decided to make an owl using a similar strategy. Back then we called the project Whoodoo, which sounded like a hooting. That’s where the owl came from. The logo is the only thing that has remained the same throughout all those years. It was the beauty of that simple moment, those magical 15 minutes, where something just clicked without trying too hard – the perfect way of creating something. And to this day, it reminds me of how it all started, serving as the symbol of the story behind it. That’s why the logo is still an owl.

Things started changing when one of my friends brought up, “Tarvi, this thing can’t be too shackled to one idea. It has to be more… abstract?” And it clicked in my head. The main aspect of a social to-do was sharing your goal and then showing the progress of its completion. It made more sense to fully remove the to-do part and simply allow showing progress on “something”. That’s how it turned into a micro-blog.

Back then, Instagram didn’t even have stories yet, I mean, they hadn’t copied that feature from Snapchat yet, let alone multi-photo posts. Our idea was still different enough compared to Stories, because the content itself was in the form of a good old “blog post”. It was never even an option for us to clone something already existing - if we’re actually doing this, then how would we approach it? However, that change for the app itself meant that we were delving more into the social network game against Instagram, Twitter, etc., and the thought of beating Zuck first appeared.

All of that meant redesigning and rewriting the code. We also ditched the idea of a native iOS app. If Sander was going to rewrite it anyway, then we might as well go with the web platform, which meant that it would be accessible from pretty much anywhere, regardless of your operating system or device. That didn’t make it any easier, though, because both in terms of code and design, you had to take into account anything from narrow phone screens to ultrawide desktop screens, low-performance cheap Android phones to high-powered PCs, different browser engines with different web technology support, etc. There were lots of variables to consider.

It was 2018, about two years since we started this journey. We knew we needed extra help because there was simply too much to do. Sander had a colleague named also Sander, who joined the effort, and additionally, my high school classmate, Jürgen, came on board.

Interestingly, back in high school, during a local movie competition, Jürgen and I found ourselves competing against (the other) Sander’s movie. At the time, we didn’t know each other, but both of our teams ran bots to manipulate the rankings – we pushed our film higher and theirs lower, and they did vice versa. Well, we all got disqualified, but one thing was now certain - we now had the ultimate hacker team for Swipekick.

We really went after it. I handled the design and creative direction, both Sanders engineered, and Jürgen brought some order to the chaos by structuring the work into tasks, sprints, and a roadmap, providing us with a path to completion. However, I believe my lack of confidence led me to constantly redesign the entire thing. Nothing seemed good enough or special enough to justify anyone joining the platform. I couldn’t quite pinpoint or explain to someone's grandma why they should care or become a user here. In hindsight, during pivots it’s easy to lose sight of why you started the thing in the first place. It’s tough because we were about to enter a war with the biggest names: Zuck and Meta, Evan Williams and Medium, Jack Dorsey and Twitter, Evan Spiegel and Snapchat. It was daunting. Yet, nothing felt like it was going to disrupt these platforms. Users are ruthless, and if they don’t understand something or see value in it, then they don’t care. It’s not like making a movie where you can physically put people in a cinema to watch it - something I was more used to. Even if moviegoers don’t like the movie, then the ending could make it worthwhile if they sit through it. Here, if users don’t get it, then you've pretty much failed instantly as they click away. That led me to redesign a lot, which created a lot of extra work, and that trickled down to constantly pushing the finish line farther away. Looking back, I couldn’t have explained why someone’s grandma should use Instagram either. My brain didn’t think about that perspective, though.

It was 2020. A couple of years had passed, but we reached the minimum viable product. In another news, worldwide pandemic was happening. In addition to worldwide health crisis, I was struggling with my own mental wellbeing - I was creatively burnt out and I couldn’t put out any more creative ideas. I still worked in the film industry back then and had the greatest opportunities I could dream of alongside with the coolest people, yet I wasn’t able produce anything of my own. I looked at Swipekick, and although I was proud of the effort and the team, I couldn’t put my finger on why it didn’t still quite feel right either. I was a toast.

Obviously, not a single soul started using it. How do you plan to make an app that you want everyone to use when you don't even know what you would use yourself? I sincerely believe that, no matter what creative pursuit you're undertaking, whether it's a screenplay, song, or an app, it's important that this work of art has heart. And at that point, nothing I tried or did had it. It came from a very wrong place because all I could think of was making "the next big thing”. That's why it never felt right or finished. Not only with Swipekick, but with movies too. It was a tough lesson to learn. Of course, at that time, I didn’t know it yet.

What I did know was that sometimes you're smart enough to understand how stupid you really are. Then you have to decide whether to stay stupid or to learn. But.. it never actually is a choice. I knew that I had reached the limit of my current knowledge, and if I wanted to continue, then I needed to learn. There were only two things that I was able to latch onto at that time: Sander’s enthusiasm about coding and the feeling I got when designing UI. So I thought, what if I could become a front-end engineer myself?

I pulled the plug on my filmmaking path and enrolled in a software development bootcamp instead. Back to day zero. Back to being a noob. The camp was merely 6 weeks long, after which I went straight to work as a full-stack Node.js and React.js developer. Looking back now, it’s insane that I actually succeeded. I worked my ass off for many years. It’s a hazy time, but I did become “good enough”. Swipekick was pretty much dead the entire time, but it still weighed heavily on my shoulders. I knew deep down that the true power of Swipekick is hidden somewhere. In order to really crack it, I needed to become great. And in order to achieve that, I needed to start fiddling with it.

And that’s what I did. I occasionally fiddled with it, both with design and coding some UI components. The problem was that I never had a clear goal or deadline for it. But then something finally happened: I turned 29. Turning 29 wasn’t a big deal on its own, but it was the realization that the year after that I’d be turning 30. Did I really want Swipekick to remain unfinished business on my shoulders as I entered this new era? No. I needed to finish it somehow, elegantly - in a manner that the time and effort everyone had put into it had actually been for something. I had to dig in and find the heart of Swipekick.

That being said, the idea of becoming the next big thing wasn't really on the map anymore. So to be fair, already at that point I wasn’t after Zuck or Musk. But it does create a nice title, right? It was more about creating something that you're happy with. Something that feels right. Something that has heart.

The concept of Feeds and Swipes was already there, but the devil is in the details. I have a quirk: I want to give it a native app feel - something reminiscent of Apple's design ethos with superellipses, roundish edges, a comfy, minimalistic style, and seamless animation using spring physics. Programs consist of ones and zeroes, and it's essential to give them a human touch from the real world. However, it's quite challenging to achieve this on the web, as it's essentially an app within another app (web browser). And that, in itself, is sub-optimal.

The challenge was actually pulling it off. I had a full-time job, and this project couldn't interfere and negatively affect my work. I had just read "Atomic Habits," and I pretty much knew that making just a little bit of progress every single day could have a big cumulative effect. However, I understood quite quickly that working after work sucks. Another option is to wake up early, and that’s exactly what I started doing. I could clock in about 2-3 hours of working on Swipekick before starting my real job.

That in itself presents lots of challenges because, by 5 PM, you’re a vegetable. You start going to bed earlier too. I must admit that there were days I did some Swipekick even after my regular job. All in all, the days got very long, and at a certain point, I realized that minimum 12-hour days had become the norm.

I don’t want to sound like a lunatic, because the entire year wasn’t the same. There were intense periods, but there were slower periods too. There were times when I was more focused on my real job, times when I had a bigger emphasis on going out with friends, and times when I started focusing more on making a movie about Swipekick. In the summer, at Tuum, we have a 4-day work week, and I was able to use Fridays for this project too. That was also a big game-changer because I had an additional day with full focus and energy that I could use. I really enjoyed those fridays. At a certain moment, I started using my vacation days to take additional fridays off.

I designed and programmed at the same time. Then I immediately saw whether it felt right or if I had to go back to the drawing board. I re-did some things about 20 times. Usually I ended up where I started.

Superellipses aren’t natively supported on the web. This is something that is native only for iOS and macOS (maybe for Android too now?). In order to achieve that effect, I need to measure every element so that I can cut the elements out with a superellipse algorithm. That poses many challenges. First, I have to skip the initial render in React. Although I’m using Next.js, which means my pages are rendered server-side, it’s only useful for SEO and Googlebot purposes. In reality, the site has to be hydrated with React before the user can use it and see it. Second, I also sometimes have to toggle the effect off when animating it. Third, due to superellipse itself, animations, and shadows, I need to create so many additional wrapper elements. All in all, this is actually plain stupid. It’s painful. Nobody is doing it. I would never do it in my actual job. But I love it here. I love how freaking smooth the end result is.

For profiles and feeds, I actually wanted to have different themes, but the priority was default light and dark modes.

The default theme bases its color scheme on the primary image, making the UI more dynamic and personal. To achieve that, every single photo that is uploaded to the platform is being analyzed for dominant color, darkness level, and other measurements, which are then persisted in the database. Additionally, I'm using AI to analyze and generate a caption for what’s in the image to use for the alt tag, which is necessary for accessibility and thus SEO.

The idea of a Swipe is to be a small unit of content, but the number of Swipes can quickly add up. For that reason, I made a custom-built slider to jump quickly between different parts of the feed. However, sometimes you simply need more space for your content, so it’s necessary to be able to expand a single Swipe. It has to be seamless, though. There’s no question about it. The real technology is not widely supported yet (View Transition API), so I had to hack myself around it. Currently, it's actually two elements on top of each other that switch to create that illusion. Let me tell you something.. it took me two months (!!) to get it on an acceptable level. I think I will rewrite it at some point to get rid of the Swiper.js library and custom build the entire thing with Framer Motion. That being said, I still made it possible to view the feed in a classical blog post or article view.

Another part I completely underestimated was the content editor itself. One feed can have many Swipes. You should be able to add, delete, and move them. The content inside of the Swipe must also be editable. There can be text, images, videos, subheadings, all of which you must also be able to add, delete, and move. The difficulty comes with images because as the Swipe is a JSON schema, there’s no relation between storage, JSON schema of a Swipe, and processed photo entities in the database.

I don't want to store images that aren’t used anywhere, but I should never-ever remove the wrong stuff either. Yet, I need to process through the images to get the dominant color, generate alt tags, compress, and resize them. So my strategy was to put UUIDs to a great use and map through the JSON to keep things up to date. It was a true mind-bender for sure.

Pretty much everything I did turned out to be more challenging than I expected, thus taking more time as well. I mis-planned the development many times. First, I was expecting to finish the platform before summer. Then, I planned to finish it in the middle of summer. Next, I aimed for the 1st of September. After that, the goal was to finish it right before my Portugal trip at the end of November, because I wanted to use it there as my trip journal. And finally, the ultimate deadline was my birthday in December, just before Christmas.

No matter how hard I tried, the work just didn’t seem to end. As I made progress, more stuff appeared. As I’ve become more skilled, the standard has constantly risen that I need to top even more. At a certain point you don’t see it with a fresh set of eyes anymore. How can I ever finish it? It truly felt that this thing cannot be finished.

Swipekick hasn’t simply been Swipekick for a long time. It’s a symbol of the story behind it. At a certain moment, I realized this, and started putting more and more thought into making a movie about it. I half-assed it at first, but the thought of it started growing on me, and soon enough I had bought additional lenses for my camera and went all in. I tried sketching an initial outline of the story and even edited some “coding sections” of the movie with placeholders, just to see if it could work. And it showed promise. Perhaps I went too far into it, because there were many months in total when I was solely focused on the movie itself. But you know what’s the craziest thing of it all? I started rediscovering my love for making videos, and I felt my creativity started to come back. Looking back, I’m not sure which turned out to be a bigger challenge - making the app or making a movie about it, because the sheer amount of self-reflection it took was staggering.

Making that movie was ultimately the thing that helped me figure this thing out. I realized that while software development is a never-ending process, Swipekick as a movie could be finished. I finally demoed the entire thing to Sander. Actually, his expertise was needed to make it production-ready, so that there aren’t any dumb things that might have slipped through my fingers. In addition to Sander, it was time to reconnect with the other Sander and Jürgen too.

Looking back, the best parts about Swipekick were me and Sander starting out and the four of us just going at it and building it. Once I realized it, then it was pretty obvious how this movie could be completed.

At a certain moment, you have to draw the line and accept that you have come a long way. And although there might be a long way to go, you simply need to release it. Not just in terms of software release or movie release, but a mental release from your mind and life. You need to make room for new stuff and new ideas to appear. So I decided to roll with it.

It’s actually funny how simple Swipekick is: it’s just a bunch of feeds, swipes, and posts. Anyone could do that within a month or two. On the other hand, that is the difference between cloning something and figuring things out on your own. To get to that simple conclusion, it took countless hours of experimentation.

We didn’t beat either Zuck or Musk, and Swipekick has only one user: me. Will it ever go public? It might. There are a couple of things that still need to be polished. I have ideas to incorporate Swipekick into many upcoming YouTube videos as I keep improving it until it’s ready to be released to the wild. But! I have now achieved what I wanted to achieve. It’s no longer a burden on my shoulders. The story and legend of Swipekick have come alive. Here it is. I’m currently writing this on Swipekick, and you’re currently reading this on Swipekick. Now, isn’t that something?

Day 0.

The moment I set foot on this island, I fell in love with it. It was warm with a nice breeze of fresh ocean air. The sun was setting, and the sky was golden. I took a Bolt cab and drove to the capital (Funchal). The light made the island shine. It was truly magnificent. My driver didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t speak any Spanish or Portuguese, but I made sure that he understood how beautiful I thought his island looked.

I came to this island with an idea: What if I lived here? Could I do it? Could I be a digital nomad? What would it feel like? It had always been on my mind. To be free of any geographical constraints. So, my plan was to try it out. I planned to stay on the island for 21 days. About 5 days of this, I planned to do work. The rest was vacation days to rest and explore the island, but I aimed to do Swipekick, some coding, designing, and also writing too.

A large part of this feed is written in retrospect, but it’s compiled from my journal that I wrote on the go on a daily basis. That's why all the past-present-future tenses are so messed up that even Grammarly and AI couldn't help me.

Day 1.

Now, there’s a great quote that no plan survives the first contact with reality. My first two days I had to do work. Like actual work. And not just that - I was doing a rather big UI re-build. So there I was - sitting on the couch, comfortably, with a nice warm sun hitting my shoulders. It was a total paradise. Except one thing - I was working. I realized this in the first 10 minutes that I had made a miscalculation.

Here’s the thing. By that point, I actually needed a vacation. I had been grinding both Swipekick and my real job a lot. Now I was in a perfect new location that was super exciting and I couldn’t go and explore it. I was still mentally back in Estonia by looking at that same computer screen. You don’t want to mix those two things. You don’t. You could do it, but then do it at the end of the trip when you have already gotten used to the new surrounding and routine. It wasn’t actually as tragic as it sounds, but it definitely was a tiny little lesson to learn.

I stayed at this really nice budget hostel. I picked it because of the balcony and interior design. I knew right away it would look cinematic. I was not wrong. It did look amazing. The only issue was that it was noisy. There was a construction site literally next to me and if that wasn’t enough, then the highway was also close by. So I slept with my Sony noise-canceling headphones.

After the work, I went for a stroll alongside the coast in Funchal. As I was walking, I found myself thinking strange thoughts like: what should I even do here? I hadn’t taken time off like that in a long time, so I totally forgot what it's like to not do work-work or Swipekick. Fortunately, my friend was to arrive on Friday evening, pretty much the next day. That was the plan - we were supposed to explore the island together.

Day 2.

It’s Friday. Not going to bother you with work talk except for one thing: I was finally able to have real mountains in my Google Meet video-call background. You know those fake backgrounds that these meeting rooms have, right? I always thought it would be great to have an actual majestic background for once. So I picked the perfect room with perfect light and a perfect window that had the perfect view.

After work ended and my actual vacation started, I opened the wine. I came to the common area to hopefully find some other travellers while I was waiting for my friend, Marten, to arrive. One hour passed. Two passed. Half a bottle of wine passed.

Then the first traveler arrived. He was Stan from the UK, originally from Poland. Anyway, we finished the entire bottle of wine. For a while, we were accompanied by one German girl too who brought beans (that we ate, thanks!). The plan was to wait for Marten to arrive around 9 PM and then go to the Yellow Castle (not the actual name) and have some beers.

That's what we did. We actually got surprisingly intoxicated and eventually made it to the castle, although it was already closed.

Still, we had fun in the three other pubs and bars on the way there. We then also decided to see the Ronaldo statue. In the middle of the night.

Day 3.

Surprisingly, no hangover. We ordered a Bolt cab and went to the next booking. It was still in Funchal, but higher up on the mountain. The road there was the steepest I’ve ever seen. There’s no way I can put into words how steep it is; you have to experience it yourself, but trust me, it was steep. The Bolt driver wasn’t too enthusiastic either about the destination.

That being said, don’t trust Google Maps here. You might think something is close, but the altitude could also have a 200-meter difference. I never would’ve thought going down the hill could turn out to be physically hard. That’s exactly what happened. And then you had to go back up again. Legs were shivering. This was no joke.

Other than that, quite a calm day. We wanted to go watch a football game, but they didn’t let me in because my backpack was full of camera gear that I couldn’t take in, and there was no way on earth I would leave this bag alone somewhere. Marten went to see the game, and I climbed back to the house. The sun was just starting to set, and I was exhilarated to start filming.

This could be the perfect YouTube thumbnail for digital nomadism in Madeira.

Marten arrived back at the exact moment of sunset, with wine, snacks, and chips. I don’t know how he was able to get those things from the stadium, but... He did. It was a good wine, but maybe because we knew we paid 3x the price for it.

Day 4.

We went to discover Funchal, so we tried to use local buses to get down to the city. The bus ride was wild. Very steep roads, curvy of course, and they were still driving relatively fast. For a second, I thought, "Ok, this is it. He’s gonna hit the wall." But no worries, he had exactly the extra 5 centimetres.

We checked out the botanical garden together with a hundred German tourists and then proceeded to the city. Turns out there was a German cruise ship that had just arrived.

Anyway, the garden was lush, and it looked awesome. We strolled around in the city, and there were some Christmas festivities happening.

We finally made it to the Yellow Castle and paid for the most overpriced meal of the entire trip. Bummer.

Then we went to another cafeteria, and there was Acoia, a dessert hyped by Marten that he had found in Brazil. We then got some groceries and took a cable car back to the top. After that we had to do a little 2-3km hike to our house, which surprisingly wasn’t too bad.

In the evening, I experienced the most intense sunset ever. There was this amazing view of the entire Funchal, and the sun just fell beneath it. Even our German neighbour was there to see it. Oddly, his wife wasn’t. Not sure what happened there.

Day 5.

I did a lot of filming in the morning. I don’t have a thought-out plan when it comes to the Madeira video, but the scenery just inspires me to shoot so much. Oddly, when I’m filming, I always feel like I’m portraying some strange enhanced version of reality. On the other hand, this is what movies are - illusions. The other thing that I wondered again about was: am I really present when I film this much? On the other hand, it’s my hobby and it’s what makes me tick. Filming and taking photos is what I like most about traveling. So yeah.

We rented a car - the lovely Fiat Panda. The cheapest one available, but the one with the most heart. We then drove to take a look at some points we marked on the map.

It also meant it was the first time driving on those crazy steep roads in Madeira. The most surreal moment was when we were driving up the hill. I guess it felt what was like 45-degree steepness. In 1st gear because the second one didn’t pull anymore. Then a big bus comes towards you and there’s room only for one. Yeah. Good times.

The temperature is so weird. Changes in minutes. Sometimes you want a warm jacket, and another moment you want to take your shirt off.

I also have to point out how productive Marten is, no matter what the environment is around him. The dude even had a business call on a cliff.

As for me, I’m rather unproductive. The last few months have been too intense, and it seems like my idea of doing Swipekick here is kind of falling apart. In fact, I haven’t been able to do it at all. So, instead, I’m just resting and focusing more on writing.

Day 6.

We went to discover the south-western part of the island. Really wanted to see a specific waterfall, but Waze completely took us to someplace else. We drove so high that we went inside the cloud and it was a strange industrial region where they were cutting down the trees. Also, coming back down was a proper off-road driving. I don’t know, Waze sometimes goes wild. Glad the car survived.

At least we experienced the famous waterfall that falls on your car.

The contemporary art museum had really interesting architecture, though.

This is supposedly the warmest section of the island. You could tell some of those areas were meant for the beach tourists. However, it was off-season, so not too many people around.

Day 7.

Woke up to the sound of rain. The rain itself stopped soon, but what was left was heavy mist. That’s just awesome about this island - it’s so rich in both nature and weather.

Then we went to the Tropical Garden, which was like a Japanese garden. It was simply perfect weather for it and gave off the vibe of an awesome jungle.

Afterward, we drove to the north of the island, where our new booking was. It's a bit more mountainous area with a nice view.

Day 8.

Woke up to the sound of wind bashing the window covers. It was that strong. In the morning, we realized that we were actually at an altitude where clouds are. Super cool! In the distance, we could hear and see a new waterfall that definitely wasn’t there before. I guess it was because of the excessive rain. So it was a bit misty, clouds at our level, a new waterfall, a bit of sun, a little rain, a rainbow, and mountains - all of it at the same time. Madeira.

Our plan was to visit Fanal Forest. The weather seemed perfect for it as it looked the best in mist. It was quite rainy and windy too. Around 4 degrees, I think, but the rain combined with wind made it harsh. Marten was in shorts, of course.

Fanal Forest itself was magnificent. It was very hard to control the camera and set the focus with that wind and rain. A couple of times, I hit record at the wrong moment (when I wanted to stop recording). This is the meme-worthy mistake. I lost two really good shots because of it. Also, the camera got water damage and eventually shut down, so I had to dry it completely. Fortunately it resurrected.

That wasn’t all. We also went to another viewpoint with supposedly the steepest cable car in Europe. And well... It looked scarily steep and straight down the cliff. But it wasn’t moving because there was no internet, so we couldn’t go. Instead, we ate and then decided to start heading back. Right at that moment, a heavy storm hit with extreme rain. I’m talking about rain where you stand and get wet in couple of seconds.

Eventually, we just ran to the car and decided to go. Also, that wasn’t the brightest idea because what followed was the most extreme car drive I have ever done (and probably will ever do). First of all, that road would’ve been steep already in perfect conditions.. and you could’ve used max second gear. Here, it was raining so heavily that the water was pouring like crazy. There was water coming from everywhere, including from inside the road. Not sure how was that possible. There was a damn cable lying on the ground. There were new waterfalls coming from the sides of the road. There were deep streams of water flowing that you had to drive through. I was going with the first gear, and even then, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it.

Fortunately, we made it, and at the end of the day, even the sun peeked out again.

Day 9.

We decided to do the waterfall hike. Again, we drove back to the high altitudes, got some rain, and then did quite a long hike downhill. Long enough to start feeling your legs. And that was downhill. This meant only one thing - we also had to come back up later.

We saw lots of waterfalls. Some bigger than others. It was off-season, and you could tell. It seemed everything was rainier and muddier than it usually would be, as some canals were overflowing, and there were moments you had to step into the water.

At the end of the first hike, we were greeted with a big-big waterfall. It was so loud there that the birds didn’t understand anything. They were chilling literally next to you and didn’t fly away. Also, it was extremely humid. Ofc my camera died. This time it died in a way that frightened me because some buttons got stuck too.

The waterfalls were awesome; however, it was a long and gruelling hike back.

We later decided to drive to Funchal to go and do some laundry. At that moment, we didn’t know yet that the next place of stay had a washing machine too.

Once we got back, we had a little wine. Because wine not? And then off to sleep because the next day we planned to do the ultimate hike.

Day 10.

Woke up at 5 AM. The plan was to arrive at Peak Arieiro at 7:20 AM, just before dawn. Not too many people were there.

Our plan was to hike the trail between two of the highest peaks, from Arieiro to Ruivo. It was about 6 kilometres one way, but we had to come back too because our car was at the start.

I had near-zero preparation. I ate a couple of cookies in the morning. I basically looked at a couple of photos of the trail and thought, "Pff, easy!" Couldn’t be more wrong. It was gruelling. 12 km in total and 1 km of total altitude gain. I was limping in the end.

Our hike started at dawn, with very few people on the trail. Some parts of the trail were extremely steep, although there were stairs. On our way back, there were lots more people and groups. There were some older people too, and I have no idea how they planned to make it through as they already had a dead gaze. I was quite pale too, especially in the end.

And once we got back to where we started, it was packed with people. I guess most are just doing the first 200 meters, which is the Instagram famous part of the trail where it looks like a narrow pathway with steep valleys on both sides.

After the hike, I personally needed to give my body some proper nutrition. I literally felt the need for protein. So we Googled for the closest and highest-rated Espetada place and went there. It was.. perfect.

Day 11.

Visited the local market. It was interesting to see how popular the Poncho actually is here. Good vibes. People were just coming to shop for fruit, eat, and drink with their families.

We then left the north part of the island, and our next home is near the southeastern tip. It’s called Canical. Very calm and sunny small town. And a very spacious apartment.

Day 12.

We decided to hike to the easternmost tip of the island. Again, we started a bit before dawn. There weren't too many people, and the scenery was amazing.

Also, the day had finally come to say goodbye to the Fiat Panda. It served us well.

We decided to go and try the local seafood and have Sangria with it. An entire jar of Sangria. We liked it so much that we ordered a second one too. We kept liking it, so we went to a bar. Got an additional jar of Sangria and started hanging out with locals. I think we got two more jars.

We were so on fire. Then we proceeded with locals to a new bar. I think we got an additional jar of Sangria from there. I remember we started dancing in front of the bar at some point. It was insane.

Yeah, we then felt it was time to call it a day.

The next morning was tough. Really tough.

Rest of the days

At this point I pretty much stopped journaling. What happened next was rest & chill.

Marten left about 4-5 days earlier than me.

I finished the trip in Machico. I picked a hotel this time with a breakfast. I was in a complete chill mode now. Looking back, Machico wasn’t the greatest option. There wasn’t much happening there. I didn’t find any travellers like myself. I tried to look, I swear. It was me solo and a hundred different couples. Fun.

Should’ve gone to Funchal instead. I proceeded to do some writing, sunbathing, listening to podcasts. It was a time of reflection and I started thinking more about Swipekick again, the movie about Swipekick and how to complete all of it.

I will keep on working on this Feed. I haven't even gone through all of the video footage that I filmed yet. There's a lot. About 1TB. I also hope to turn it into a video of some sort.