Terra : des voyages au cœur du vivant
We're not offering you a vacation. We're offering you an adventure. An exploration into the heart of the living worldwhere every encounter, every landscape is an invitation to rethink our relationship with the world.
Pourquoi Terra ?
Because we believe in tourism that goes far beyond mere entertainment. Tourism that feeds the soul and empowers. Tourism that respects the planet's limits, while enabling everyone to enjoy a unique and transformative experience.
Who we are
We are a constellation of local agencies, daydreamers, storytellers, explorers and builders, united by a common passion: to make travel an unforgettable and unique experience.
Our values, our compass:
We decided to to create extraordinary travel experiences. We want you to experience unforgettable moments, discover unusual places and have experiences that will transform you.
OUR SLOGAN: A TRIP IS ONLY WORTHWHILE IF IT'S EXTRAORDINARY
Tailor-made experiences:
We create unique itineraries tailored to your desires and values.
Real encounters:
We put you in touch with local communities, artisans, artists, men and women who want to share.
Sustainable travel with a positive impact:
Each trip is designed to respect natural limits and support local projects.
Creating a community:
When you travel with us, you become part of a network of passionate, committed travelers who share the same values.
I support the idea of live travel.
2024 is the hottest year in the last 100 years, but it's also the coldest and most stable in the next 100. So it's easy to understand the fluctuating world that awaits us.
We have to stop doing things that concern few people, are dispensable and pollute a lot; private jets and yachts for example, lion hunting, Brazilian ype terraces, 4×4s in cities, kiwis all year round in supermarkets.
Il faut arrêter avec la performance, et aller vers plus de robustesse. L’appel à la sobriété et à la résilience est une impasse, selon moi. La résilience, effectivement, est là pour nous aider à nous relever, mais pour aller où ? résilient, on ressort cabossé du trou dans lequel on est tombé, pour reprendre sa route, résilient, dans la même direction,… jusqu’au prochain trou, qui, on le sait désormais, sera plus profond et plus dur encore. Et ainsi de suite. Il s’agit donc de ne pas tomber et de changer de route, et encore mieux de de bifurquer, l’inverser même.
It's a question of trying the 3rd way, that of the living, and imitating it. Darwinism is not the law of the strongest or the most efficient, because living beings have no use for our "always more, always further, higher, faster". Intelligence is a measure of our ability to adapt to our environment and to survive (last, pass on). In today's highly fluctuating world, we need to build up our robustness, i.e. our ability to develop despite fluctuations.
As opposed to performance, robustness is a constructive and perennial direction. It is built on 8 values, including randomness, inconsistency, slowness, redundancy, heterogeneity... This means multiplying interactions. This is what all robust living beings do. Parasites, for example, build the robustness of those they attack. In a never-ending loop, life needs everyone: bacteria, microbes, parasites, fungi, ungratefully named weeds, flowers, trees, mammals, toads, sardines, albatrosses, ants, dragonflies, foxes, sparrows, earthworms, tireless workers in feeding us all. Glory and thanks to earthworms!
And how does homo sapiens multiply interactions? We travel!
Isn't curiosity his first talent?
Its ability to make living things sacred, to challenge them, to study them, to love them, and to marvel at a waterfall in Iguaçu, for example. This ability to understand the world, to love it, to grasp that planet earth is round, and that it is part of a galaxy, and itself in an accelerating universe?
Curiosity, exploring, traveling, interacting with the world and others (Otherness) is the essence of our species and I like to think that it's the most beautiful thing there is and that it's what will enable us to rebuild what we've been destroying for a century, without even knowing it.
So there's no point in cursing my own species and complaining about it. I'm not outside or separate or above the living, I'm part of it, so long live the living, long live life, long live the journey.
Notre espèce a un rôle particulier dans tout cela. Elle est sans doute la seule espèce vivante à s’interroger sur la vie et du pourquoi de tout cela. Et à saisir qu’elle est en train de scier la branche sur laquelle elle est magnifiquement assise et qui fait partie d’un tout qui est la meilleure maison qui soit, de la taille l’épaisseur de la bulle de savon… Nous sommes en train de dévaster notre habitat et le vivant, et nous le savons.
La météorite ne va pas tomber, ce n’est pas le scénario de Don’t look up, il est déjà tombé, il est déjà trop tard. Nous devons désormais développer notre robustesse, c’est ce que nous avons de mieux à faire, et d’aimer la vie et le vivant. Et donc d’arrêter de travailler pour des gens qui arrivent en jet privé, car c’est insulter l’avenir que l’on souhaite et nos croyances.
And we can still continue our work in a different way, which is to multiply the interactions of living things. In short, let's put an end to dispensable, polluting tourism, for few people. And let's sell extraordinary travel.
But what do we do with robustness if all we're up against are high-performers?
If my opponent wants to kill me, and sends me high-tech remote-controlled missiles, with AI trajectory calculation, undetectable, in short, inevitable...
Or if my competitor is doing the same thing as me, but not as well, and with no ecological value, and who doesn't question my good intentions, but is cutting prices because he's young and also wants to succeed in life, then I have to be competitive or else I'll disappear and what I've built up over the years will crumble, and do I want to find myself in a mess?
We're in a world of abundance, and there's an abundance of travelers who are going to leave anyway. And in a world of abundance, what works is competition, performance. Robustness would therefore consist in being able to perform when necessary, and robust the rest of the time, or robust at the same time, because that's it, my everyday activity is in a world of abundance. Just as my temperature rises when I'm attacked by a virus, before returning to its cruising temperature when I'm better. But the overall context is highly fluctuating, made up of strong and unpredictable uncertainties, and one thing is certain: the future is uncertain. I'm going to have to adapt while surviving, and be robust all the time and efficient when necessary. Adaptable, stable, despite fluctuations, and thus imitate the living. No wonder, I'm alive myself, aren't I?
So how do you go about doing business robustly and efficiently?
La performance (efficacité + efficience) se construit au détriment de la robustesse, cette capacité à se maintenir stable malgré les fluctuations.
Avec Terra, nous choisissons la voie de la robustesse et de la bio-économie, autrement dit de l’éco-entrepreneuriat. Comment allons-nous faire ?
- We recognize the need to develop our robustness, our ability to grow despite the certainty of entering an unpredictable, deteriorating and multi-crisis world.
– Nous décidons de mettre de la circularité dans notre activité (abandonner autant que possible l’économie linéaire au profit de l’économie circulaire).
– Nous renonçons aux gains provenant de choses les plus toxiques, qui concernent peu de monde, et qui sont aisément dispensables (par exemple les clients venant en avion pour faire une éco-pause dans le désert de 3 jours).
- We produce something useful, available and sustainable.
- We reduce our harmful impacts and increase the virtues of our circuits
Welcome home!
We're building a story: the story of making travel extraordinary and unique. We want you to be part of this story, to become its main heroes.
If you're here, it's because you love stories, because you love to travel... just like us...
We're a gathering, a tribe, a band of local agencies committed to reinventing travel, or rather, to giving it back its letters of nobility.
We are convinced that travel has its virtues, essential for getting to know others and ourselves. We're also aware of the negative impact our passion has on the future of humanity. If you're here, it's because you probably share the same view.
How can we satisfy our passion while respecting the planet? Tourism destroys what it desires.
By becoming part of our community, you commit yourself to traveling differently, to (re)learning how to travel: by taking your time, by accepting the unexpected, by allowing yourself to be contemplative, and sometimes even bored... in short, you leave room for the extraordinary.
We are local agencies, rooted in a territory, and we love to create these adventures, your adventure.
We try to combine travel and planetary limits.
And it's an adventure we want to share with you!
Somos Terra.
Our planet is marked by the excesses of the Anthropocene, as we see every day.
Our world is evolving, and so is our relationship with living things, fast, too fast, with too many fluctuations and uncertainties.
And yet our thirst for discovery remains unquenched and our quest for the World unquenched: it's wonderful and inspiring...
So let's get back to the essence of Adventure, encounters and commitment to the original, decarbonized, conscious and committed journey.
After all, life is a perpetual journey where only the winding path matters.
So let's change the way we think and the way we do things.
This is our firm conviction and our commitment today, for tomorrow, together.
Our network of professional receptive partners, experienced for 30 years, as passionate as ever, established in the four corners of the world, connected to our local realities, has decided to reinvent itself and is committed to a transition towards extraordinary travel that is robust and intense.
Nous sommes des créateurs de Voyages Extraordinaires uniques. Nous inventons des expériences singulières, locales et vraies.
It's an exciting entrepreneurial and human adventure that we want to share with the world to reconnect us, here and there.
Travel is above all a transformational human experience, committed to respecting our hosts and their ecosystems.
Let's travel less, less frequently, better and longer. No matter the distance, Adventure begins when you leave your dreams behind.
What do you take away from a trip?
An encounter, an emotion, an anecdote, a smile, something that made us feel alive and vibrant. All too often, however, we forget about reciprocity, interaction with our hosts and their cultures, and respect for the Pachamama. Let's get back to the essence.
Au sein de notre réseau Terra nous construisons donc ensemble un nouvel écosystème inversé qui remet l’Humain, le Vivant et les intéractions au cœur de ce projet de partage, autour du Grand Périple et des Grandes Expéditions.
Together with our local teams, we build heterogeneous and protean bio-travels, symbiotic and serendipitous, to invent rich and intense interactions whose impact is measured.
In short, a truly conscious and committed journey that we had forgotten and put aside.
We are in the process ofconventional travel.
The journey is only worthwhile if it's EXTRAORDINARY.
Somos Gaïa and we're proud of it.
Welcome to our home, because it's yours! Join the quest...
Gaïa est un super organisme vivant, c’est la planète Terre vue comme une mère, celle qu’on appelle Pachamama dans les Andes. Nous sommes les enfants de la Pachamama, de Gaia, et nos activités extractivistes l’ont mené à l’agonie. Partout la destruction du vivant est à l’œuvre à une vitesse impressionnante et le tourisme participe de la même logique destructrice.
Alors Terra se propose le temps d’un voyage d’ouvrir les yeux, d’éblouir les voyageurs, de donner à vivre des aventures.
Nous voulons mettre en pratique dans tout l’écosystème Terra les principes de robustesse, de solidarité, d’engagement. Les rencontres sont l’essence des voyages et nous proposons de les favoriser. Nous imaginons des histoires que d’autres vont vivre pour découvrir des territoires nouveaux tout en les protégeant.
Le tourisme enferme dans une logique d’entre soi, où on ne fait aucune rencontre réelle, où toutes les personnes et les infrastructures sont préparées pour qu’on reste comme chez soi. Le voyage promet tout le contraire: sortir de chez soi, de ses certitudes, voir la beauté du monde, s’engager auprès de ceux qui défendent la vie.
The journey is only worthwhile if it's extraordinary.
What if we told you we were tardigrades in the making? You'd turn the page before you'd finished the sentence.
What if we added that we're tiny and quite ugly? You'd be right to do better with your time.
But what if we told you that it's the strongest living thing that inspires us? You'd begin to trust us...
We're a group of friends who've been working in the tourism industry for twenty years.
We've seen our world evolve, and we've evolved with it.
With our strong ecological convictions, we are convinced that we can no longer carry on as before... this unbridled consumerism must stop, or at least slow down, quickly.
Tourists continue to invade the planet, which is why we've chosen to get out of the tourism business, but continue to sell travel. but to continue selling travel. Travel that's less frequent, longer and more meaningful. Trips that give you a human experience experiences that you'll remember for the rest of your life, without having to look at the photos.
That's what travel is all about: meeting other people, learning about their way of life, exchanging with them to open up our horizons and come back enriched, in the hope that this will change the way we see the world..
Terra est une fédération d’experts locaux proposant un tourisme alternatif autour du partage d’expériences avec un seul mot d’ordre : « L’humain au cœur ».
We feed off the people and the world around us. Travel is a generator of happiness, intimately linked to a part of our lives.
We're a group of good friends and seasoned travelers with a wide range of backgrounds. We're enriched by our differences and by sharing our knowledge.
We live our destinations from the inside out, with the mission of bringing our travelers and local players together.
Our aim is to arouse curiosity and stir emotions by sharing unique experiences and unprecedented adventures. Journeys that create memories. Experiences that change the way we see the world.
The idea here is to create mission trips, learning trips that make sense for us and for you.
Let's get back to our essence, that of being alive, rich in feelings and connections with the outside world, with the Earth that has welcomed us since the dawn of time.
Terra incarne l’idée que le véritable voyage est celui qui nous ramène à notre statut d’être sensible, interagissant, ressentant, observant, évoluant, partageant et découvrant le monde qui nous entoure avec un regard nouveau.
We live in an ever-changing world with many fluctuations, where we are protagonists capable of acting together and collectively to experiment, explore, create, meet, cooperate, interact... Live.
Le Voyage Extraordinaire de Terra, c’est celui qui nous reconnecte à nos racines et à notre environnement, qui nous offre une nouvelle perspective sur la nature et sur les autres, pour mieux vivre ensemble. Il nous reconnecte aux valeurs essentielles qui nous définissent, fait émerger notre âme d’aventurier, révèle aussi l’explorateur et l’observateur qui sommeillent en nous.
Our extraordinary journeys, to the four corners of planet Earth, are bursts of explosions of emotions and fusions of interactions that will help you discover parts of yourself you never knew existed.
Terra, notre collectif d’agences de voyages avant-gardiste, vous lance cette invitation à la quête d’une nouvelle perception du Voyage. Une véritable quête des sens, pour redécouvrir votre place dans ce monde tout en cultivant un lien authentique, fragile, unique et pluriel avec les éléments qui vous entourent…
Le Voyage Extraordinaire de Terra transcende la simple quête de soi. Il ouvre la voie à la découverte de l’Autre à travers des moments extra-ordinaires, originaux, hors du commun, spéciaux, uniques, qui s’inscrivent profondément en nous, nous invitant à réfléchir sur notre propre existence et nos relations.
Synergies, connections, symbioses and interactions are at the heart of our travels.
Un voyage est en soi une aventure extraordinaire: sortir de son quotidien « Métro, boulot, dodo ».
Over time, this search for otherness, this often sincere desire to touch the present moment to touch the present moment, to (re)taste the marvel of the ephemeral, has become corruptible.. The cult of performance and "everything, right away", the development of tourism in our destinations and the ever-increasing flow of information via the Internet have created a shell for travelers that is difficult to break.
Let's face it: while the process remains extraordinary, the journeys are often not.
Chez Terra, nous tentons de rester fidèle à la quête originelle souvent oubliée des voyageurs et professionnels du voyage.
How do we do it? By creating rich experiences of discovery and interaction in a world that's moving in the opposite direction. Yet a world in which we and our children will have to live.
We are French, Bolivian, Brazilian, Peruvian, Moroccan, Ecuadorian, Argentinean, Portuguese, Chilean...
We are citizens of the world of different nationalities and backgrounds, passionate about travel and united by the same conviction: "A trip is only worthwhile if it's extraordinary".
With offices all over the world, we represent a network of 12 local agencies in Latin America, Africa, Australia and Europe.
Free and independent, friends over the years, we are first and foremost a group of experienced experienced professionals who work together and share common values: curiosity curiosity, cooperation, robustness, conviviality, commitment, responsibility, sustainability, serendipity, adventure...
Terra Gaïa, pourquoi ? Du grec “gè” « terre », et “aia” « grand-mère », Gaïa symbolise la terre nourricière, la fameuse Terre-Mère. Plus récemment, l’ »hypothèse Gaïa » a contribué à une prise de conscience majeure : celle de notre responsabilité, individuelle et collective, face au réchauffement climatique et à la préservation de la biodiversité. En tant que professionnels du voyage, c’est à cette responsabilité que nous faisons référence en choisissant de nous appeler Terra Gaïa.
Gaïa c’est également un écosystème vivant, un système composé de différentes entités interdépendantes : interactions, coopérations, échanges, sont au cœur de notre univers. L’empreinte sur notre logo renvoie d’ailleurs à cette notion d’impact, comme une métaphore de l’empreinte que nos voyages laissent sur les écosystèmes et les populations locales mais également sur les voyageurs et sur nous en tant que voyagistes qui concevons ces voyages, sur nos équipes, nos guides etc….
Is it possible to stop traveling? Is it even desirable? What are the environmental, social, economic and geopolitical impacts of our travels? All these reflections have led us to one major conclusion: A TRIP IS ONLY WORTHWHILE IF IT'S EXTRAORDINARY!
This leitmotiv now forms our foundation and guides our every decision. We have embarked on a great adventure: the creation of extraordinary and unique journeys. Journeys where the experience takes precedence over the destination, journeys that leave their mark on those who live them, whatever their place in history (customers, guides, sales people, accountants :)...)
At the end of the day, we won't be quite the same!
