Aug
13
Connie Galicia has jumped out of a hotel pool because a herd of elephants was on the way, toured in vehicles adorned by a cheetah on the roof and another that a giraffe crashed through. She’s also been stuck in steamy traffic jams caused by India’s sacred cows.
Galicia has travelled to Indonesia where she hoped the tribes were no longer cannibalistic and to Ethiopia where she observed a Mursi woman remove a pottery plate from her stretched lower lip to eat.
“I don’t want to see the world. I want to experience it,” says the 64-year-old Galicia.
That she has done. Over the last 24 years the Windsor woman has visited 101 countries. She doesn’t even count a country if she’s only been in the airport. If you consider the United Nations has 193 member states or countries, Galicia has experienced different cultures in more than half the world.
She wasn’t alone. As owner of Above and Beyond Connie Travel Inc., she’s escorted
groups of travellers to about 80 of the 101 countries and her husband Felix now comes, too. She shuns touristy spots and seeks out the exotic in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East. She says she has the best job, although it’s so fun it’s more like a hobby to her.
“I have the best life in the world,” she says.
She credits Felix and their honeymoon in Asia for starting her travel obsession. “In Thailand they were still farming in the fields with a plow and a horse. Those kinds of things just opened my eyes that there is a whole world there.”
After she raised her two children, she went to St. Clair College for its tourism program and worked at Essex Travel.
Her first group travel was to Thailand and some of those clients are still with her signing up for new adventures in their 70s and 80s.
She started her own travel business and organizes about six trips a year. She’s now booking in 2016, including her version of around the world in 40 days.
“They all seem to thirst for that, looking for that little niche that you don’t discover in Europe and you don’t find in normal places,” she says of her family of about 350 clients. “The group to Burma (Myanmar), they’re going to sleep on a school floor. They’re going into a remote area. There are no hotels and there is nothing there. But they’re willing to do it because they want to find that little special something out there that’s not discovered by other people, that’s not spoiled by other tourists.”
Getting there sometimes means driving on bald tires with no air conditioning in 107 F heat. That was Ethiopia. She remembers searching for beer for the group because it would be safer than drinking the water.
Galicia says you can’t buy experiences like the one when her group was warned to get out of a swimming pool because it was bath time for a herd of elephants. She says she probably shouldn’t tell the one about the giraffe landing on a Jeep. She was travelling with one of her groups in Kenya on a freeway where cars go about 50 km/h when their vehicle hit a giraffe. The giraffe and passengers were fine but the Jeep was totalled because the giraffe landed on the roof. Another time, Galicia was on a safari when a cheetah hopped on top of the group’s vehicle. “We’re looking and all of a sudden there is a tail sitting in front of the windshield,” she recalls. “Then she looks down at you inside and everybody is still and quiet because they’re thinking, what is this cheetah going to do.”
As much as Galicia likes travelling around the globe, you won’t catch her behind the wheel.
“I don’t drive,” she admits while trying to give directions to her office. “Now how does that sound? I take people everywhere around the world but to get you to my office it’s like, OK….”
shill@windsorstar.com
GALICIA’S TOP FIVE FAVOURITE DESTINATIONS
- Irian Jaya in Indonesia
- Ethiopia
- Burma
- Madagascar
- Peru
TOP THREE SPOTS GALICIA WOULD LIKE TO VISIT
- Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc. “I’m missing the ‘stan’ countries. I haven’t gotten there yet. That’s on the bucket list.”
- Papua New Guinea
- Ghana
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