Travel is in Poppy’s blood. With Spanish and South African heritage and family scattered across the globe, there was never much chance of her staying put. She’s kept a travel journal since she could hold a pen and is now five volumes deep.
After school, she flew one way to Greece, promising her parents she’d be back in two weeks. She came home seven weeks later, and that set the pattern: a month in Costa Rica became six months across Central and South America, and university brought a summer in Indonesia and a dissertation written in the Kenyan bush. After a History of Art degree at Bristol, she spent six months in Australia and New Zealand (two of them living out of a van), then flew on to Japan, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
Of everywhere, Sri Lanka is the one that stuck. A friendship with a tuk-tuk driver became a private tour of the island: swapping stories, stopping at his favourite temples, and finishing with a lesson in driving the tuk-tuk herself. It’s the people, she says, and of course the tea, that won her over (she has the tattoo to prove it).
Poppy grew up watching her mother sell trips around the world from the kitchen table, and it was that Sri Lanka trip that convinced her this was the life for her. She joined ETG in 2026 and specialises in Sri Lanka.
Her latest trip back took her into corners of the island she hadn’t seen before and settled two things: she is a birdwatcher at heart, and there is no such thing as too many helpings of coconut sambol. One day she’ll never forget began in Galle Fort, her favourite spot on the island, and ended by boat in a rural village, rustling up a twelve-course Sri Lankan lunch with people from the village.
With each visit, she falls harder for the people. For a country that has been through so much over the past thirty years, the welcome is remarkable: you’re met with the biggest, warmest smiles you’ll ever see. She wishes she could say the same for her Northern line commute.
“Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller” – Ibn Battuta
