Planet Hoppers | April 2020

April 2020

California’s 2019 Travel Consultant of the Year - LUXlife Magazine

Bay Area’s 2019 Best International Bespoke Holiday Agency - LUXlife Magazine

I would always be the first to advocate exploration, adventure, and discovery. But now is not the time. Global cooperation is required to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Please stay home, stay healthy, and stay positive. And always keep dreaming.

To inspire your future travels, have a look at some of the media we've sourced from virtual tours. And, read about April's

Featured Trip of the Month: Sri Lanka. Gabriel is a travel photographer and you'll want to see the amazing images he captured on his journey!

Featured Trip Of The Month

GABRIEL CAPTURES SRI LANKA

See their fun-filled itinerary here.

See the route his itinerary took him: Itinerary Route Map

I was interested in going someplace I’d never been before. I had been hearing about Sri Lanka for a number of years and it really appealed to me. I’ve been a semi-professional photographer for almost 20 years. I have a real estate license in the Bay Area, so that’s how I make a living, but my dad was a fashion photographer and I’ve had a camera in my hands since I was 7 or 8. Fortunately, I get to put on gallery shows every couple of years to display my travel photos.

I’m shooting everything I’m moved by, as a photographer. I want to shoot it all. I find so much inspiration just by being in a location. I do a lot of research to choose my equipment for the day. I take two cameras with me every day. If going to the market, I'll have a 35 mm prime lens, a 28 mm - 70 mm, and a 70 mm - 200 mm because I’ll expect to do a lot of close-ups on a lot of faces, hands of people working, or on food. I also lugged a 200-500 mm telephoto lens all the way to Sri Lanka to make sure I didn’t miss a thing.

The safari was the highlight, but there were also waterfalls, and tea plantations up in the mountains. I went up to this huge mountain peak and famous look-out point: Lipton’s Seat, to see the sunrise near the city of Haputali. The fog completely fills the mountain valley and all you see is the tops of the mountain peaks.

Where I grew up in Upstate New York, we had wild areas and refuges, but nothing ever as expansive as here: you’re seeing baby elephants to old elephants all in the wild, hundreds of species of birds, buffalo, crocodiles, mind-blowingly amazing. I get very passionate when I speak about animals and photographing them.

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Just have an open mind and get out, see the world, expand your mind. The amount of growth I’ve experienced through the world of travel cannot be conveyed in mere words. I’ve become such a better person through travel. My life could not have been the same without having met Amy. The work that she does is extraordinary… a true testament to a professional. She’s absolutely amazing at what she does. The idea of hiring someone ‘back in the day’ would have been strange to me, but to have the local connection, to gain access to places a normal tourist would never have access to, I would never have been able to do this on my own, no matter how much research I would have done. Having experienced this level of planning and service, I certainly would not want to travel without Amy's guidance. Even the kind of credit cards I have now, is because of her…ones that earn points that I can use for travel. Some come with medical insurance or trip insurance. All these little intricacies I really never would have known on my own without her advice. And things like passport information. The amount of knowledge that woman has in her head is phenomenal.

Because of Amy, I’ve seen 12 countries since 2015. She has such a passion for what she does and she does it so well, that I’m all aboard. Sri Lanka was very much an unknown environment for me. I really thrive and want to do things like that, I just want to be pushed. It was really a spectacular trip.

See more of Gabriel's photography here.