Tuesday 16 December 2008

The Adventure Company: Staff Profile of The Month- Vicky Gallear

This month our UK Agency Sales Manager, Vicky Gallear tells us more about her role within The Adventure Company, her travelling experience and a few of her personal tips and highlights..


Photobucket
The Monastery, Petra, Jordan
I’m responsible for looking after all the travel agents in the UK who sell Adventure Company trips. I go out and train them on how our trips work, let them know about anything new we might have launched, fire them up about the variety we offer, answer their questions, fix any issues they might have, find new agents who might want to sell our trips… anything that the agents feel they need really.

What do you love most about your job?

Travel is my passion and I get to talk about it with people all day long. A big part of my role is getting travel agents excited about the types of trips we sell – the type of trips that I’ve travelled on and loved. I essentially get paid to talk to people about my holiday highlights (as well as the practicalities of how we operate as a company of course!)!

Photobucket
Early morning at Lake Atitlan, with the twin volcanoes of San Pedro & Toliman in the background, Atitlan Volcano is just out of shot

What is your most memorable travel experience?
I find on every trip I’ve ever done there are a couple of ‘wow’ moments. A time when it suddenly just clicks in your head ‘I can’t believe I’m actually HERE!’ and every one of them is a favourite moment. Everything from my first dive on the Great Barrier Reef, to standing in the deserted ruins of Yachilan in Mexico and hearing howler monkeys ‘roaring’ in the surrounding jungle, to Christmas Eve on Fraser Island, camping with 6 others and just looking up at the stars which looked like a tub of glitter had been knocked over the sky…,

Photobucket
An anteater in a tree in Tkial, I’d never even seen one in a zoo, let alone in the wild!
Photobucket
A great boat trip to some Mayan ruins on the Mexico/Guatemala border, watching monkeys playing in the trees iguanas and the like basking on the banks was incredible!

What is the funniest thing that has ever happened on a trip?
There are a lot of ‘you had to be there moments’ which are funnier in hindsight than they actually were at the time. I’m not sure it would be really fair to bore people with any of them – usually you needed to know the characters involved!

Where have you been?
Family holidays driving across the continent were the staple style when I was growing up. There were 6 of us, and loading everyone into my Dad’s estate car and hitching a trailer on the back with our tent in was the only way we knew to travel! The journey itself has always been always the best bit of travelling for me. We were lucky living in Hampshire, a ferry from Portsmouth and we were off – France, Spain, Italy, Austria…

Photobucket
Watching the locals walking through the night to construct the stunning ‘carpets’ for Semana Santa in Antigua, Guatemala

Straight from University I took my first trip on my own, a month long coast to coast across the USA from LA to New York which was fantastic and I met a great bunch of people, mainly Australians – which made my next destination a pretty obvious one! Following what I now recognise as the typical backpacker route I flew to Australia via South East Asia and spent a year working a bit and wandering a lot!

Photobucket
Sunrise from my sleeping bag at Wadi Rum, Jordan

Since joining The Adventure Company I have been lucky enough to travel to amazing spots including Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Crete!

Where are you going next?
There are so many places that I haven’t been yet and every time I think about it my wish list grows. I’ve never done a safari so I’d love to escape to Tanzania, Kenya or Namibia during 2009. Two other countries featuring in my plans for the (hopefully) not too distant future are India and Nepal – ‘must see’ destinations that I’ve yet to visit.

Best travel tip:
Look out of the window. People who sleep through the entire journey, waking at their destinations miss out on so much, particularly on road trips and overland adventures. It’s when you’re driving through the smaller places that you actually get see people living their lives and you get a real feel for the country you’re visiting – don’t miss it!

Photobucket
Looking over the Sinai Peninsula from halfway down Mt. Sinai, Egypt

What inspires you to travel?
Without a shadow of a doubt, I have the travel bug, and it’s nothing more or less than that. I’ve always had it and I love getting away from the day to day. I’m just as happy travelling within the UK as I am on an overland adventure through Central America. I can’t narrow it down to a neat cliché like ‘experiencing other cultures’ or ‘seeking adventure’, it’s a combination of so many things. I just know that when I’m not travelling I want to be because I haven’t seen nearly enough places yet, and when I am on the road I want to keep going. I can’t explain it, it’s just there. That’s why I love my job; it lets me spend all my time surrounded by travel in one form or another – and it gives me lots of ideas for trips to do next!

No comments: