Lara Gudbjorg didn’t camp out her suitcase with coffee beans, batik shirts or Indonesian snacks, like most tourists do. Nope. She camped it out with something more… fluffy. Two full-sized bolsters. Yes, bolsters. Straight from Indonesia to Iceland.
And no, we are not talking about the weirdness of impulse buying. Lara promises there is a legitimate reason for hauling these huggable giants half way around the world. Bolsters apparently don’t exist in Iceland. Well, she has found one but it had an unbelievable price tag of around $320. “Absolutely not,” she laughed in a viral TikTok. “So I made a space in my suitcase. priorities.”
Of course, “made a space” meant a whole lot more suitcase space than I thought she would have to give up. One bolster took up half her check-in bag and the other took a huge amount of her cabin luggage. In a video she posted right before she was on her way home, she gave her followers the chance to guess what was in her carry-on before revealing in one word what was in her bag, “Bolstered.”
As expected, the internet had a lot to say. Commenters flocked in with jokes and common sense solutions. A lot of folks told her she should vacuum seal the bolsters to help save space. “Honey, you can vacuum the guling,” one wrote, using the Indonesian word for bolster. Another one wrote, “Why not vacuum first? Saves space lah.”
Interestingly, Lara is not an isolated case. She is not the only foreigner who has developed a deep love affair with one of Indonesia’s prized sleep accessories. One Swede admitted that when she moved to Sweden more than two decades ago, she brought her bolsters with her on day one and never looked back.
So now, whether you are an experienced traveller or a novice tourist, here’s the question that Lara left hanging- could you sleep without a bolster once you have tried it?
