Terra Gaïa: journeys to the heart of life
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.
Why Terra Gaia?
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.
We need to stop focusing on performance, and move towards greater robustness. The call for sobriety and resilience is a dead end, in my opinion. Resilience is there to help us get back on our feet, but to go where? resilient, we emerge dented from the hole we've fallen into, to resume our journey, resilient, in the same direction... until the next hole, which we now know will be even deeper and harder. And so it goes on. So it's a question of not falling, but of changing the road, and even better, of forking it, even reversing it.
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.
Our species has a special role to play in all this. We're probably the only living species to question life and why it's all happening. And to realize that it is sawing off the branch on which it is magnificently seated and which is part of a whole that is the best house there is, the size the thickness of the soap bubble... We are devastating our habitat and living things, and we know it.
The meteorite isn't going to fall, it's not the don't look up scenario, it's already fallen, it's already too late. Now we have to to develop our robustness, which is the best thing we can do, and to love life and living things. And to stop working for people who arrive in private jets, because that's an insult to the future we want and to our beliefs.
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?
Performance (effectiveness+efficiency) is built at the expense of robustness, the ability to remain stable despite fluctuations.
With Terra Gaia, we're choosing the path of robustness and bio-economy, in other words, eco-entrepreneurship. How are we going to do it?
- We recognize the need to develop our robustness, our ability to grow despite the certainty of entering an unpredictable, deteriorating and multi-crisis world.
- We decided to put circularity into our business. (Move away from the linear economy to the circular economy).
- We forego gains from the most toxic things, which concern few people, and which are easily dispensable. (e.g. customers flying in for a 3-day desert eco-break).
- 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 Gaïa.
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.
We are creators of unique Extraordinary Journeys. We invent unique, local and authentic experiences.
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.
Within our Terra Gaia network, we're building a new inverted ecosystem that puts people, life and interaction back at the heart of this sharing project, around the Great Journey and the Great Expeditions.
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...
Gaia is a living super-organism, the planet Earth seen as a mother, the one we call Pachamama in the Andes. We are the children of the Pachamama, of Gaia, and our extractivist activities have brought her to her knees. Everywhere, the destruction of living things is taking place at an impressive rate, and tourism is part of the same destructive logic.
So Terra Gaia offers to open eyes, to dazzle travelers, to inspire adventure.
We want to put into practice throughout the Gaia ecosystem the principles of robustness, solidarity and commitment. Encounters are the essence of travel, and we propose to encourage them. We imagine stories that others will live to discover new territories while protecting them.
Tourism traps you in a logic of self-centeredness, where you don't meet anyone for real, where all the people and infrastructures are prepared to make you feel at home. Gaia travel promises just the opposite: get away from it all, see the beauty of the world, get involved with those who defend life.
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 Gaïa is a federation of local experts offering alternative tourism based on shared experiences, with a single watchword: the "human heart".
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 Gaïa embodies the idea that the real journey is one that brings us back to our status as sentient beings, interacting, feeling, observing, evolving, sharing and discovering the world around us with fresh eyes.
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.
Terra Gaïa's Extraordinary Journey is one that reconnects us with our roots and our environment, offering us a new perspective on nature and others, for a better life together. It reconnects us with the essential values that define us, brings out our adventurous soul, and reveals the explorer and observer within us.
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 Gaïa, our collective of avant-garde travel agencies, invites you on a quest for a new perception of travel. A true quest for the senses, to rediscover your place in this world while cultivating an authentic, fragile, unique and plural bond with the elements that surround you...
Terra Gaia's Extraordinary Journey transcends the simple quest for self. It opens the way to discovering the Other through moments that are extra-ordinary, original, out of the ordinary, special, unique, and deeply rooted in us, inviting us to reflect on our own existence and relationships.
Synergies, connections, symbioses and interactions are at the heart of our travels.
Terra + Gaia = Earth
1 + 1 = 3
A trip is an extraordinary adventure in itself: getting away from the daily grind of "metro, work, bed".
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.
At Terra Gaïa, we strive to remain faithful to the original quest often forgotten by travelers and travel professionals.
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...
Why Terra Gaia? From the Greek "gè" meaning "earth", and "aia" meaning "grandmother", Gaia symbolizes Mother Earth. More recently, the "Gaia hypothesis" has contributed to a major realization: that of our individual and collective responsibility for global warming and the preservation of biodiversity. As travel professionals, it is to this responsibility that we refer when we choose to call ourselves Terra Gaïa.
Gaia is also a living ecosystem, a system made up of various interdependent entities: Interaction, cooperation and exchange are at the heart of our universe. The footprint on our logo refers to this notion of impact, as a metaphor for the imprint our trips leave on ecosystems and local populations, but also on travelers and on us as tour operators who design these trips, on our teams, our 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!
Immerse yourself in the Terra Gaia universe and receive news from the ends of the earth every 15 days :)
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