Greetings from Sri Lanka, I am Ilankovan Thushyantha, a level nine local guide who lives a simple life that is interlocked with passion, self-satisfactions, and values. Learning about surroundings, meeting new people, exploring different things that I like expands my perspective on life, and makes me grow as an interesting person who has lived life well. Travel and exploration have long been my stimulants.
Underwater exploration is the most delightful activity I undertake.
I am an ardent snorkeler and a fervent diver who loves swaying myself with groupers, snappers, angels, puffers, and many more species. This underwater stir, while nourishing my passion, helps me share experiences with travelers around the world who also has the same interest through Google maps. Apart from these underwater journeys, I have also undertaken many nature expeditions around the country, along with my local guide colleagues in Sri Lanka. This includes videos and 3600 captures of rain forests, parks, gardens, and other natural habitats around the country. One of these significantly exciting experiences was My first visit to Sinharaja rainforest. This first experience of one large capture of 3600 coverage motivated me to gather more experiences like boat ride, life underwater, underwater marine world, Let’s Map Underwater, Exploring the world underwater and its inhabitants, And how to make coral construction.
Interacting with urban, rural, and tribal communities.
The way you see life is the way you live it. Being a local guide takes me everywhere along various structures of the community. For instance, the involvement of urban people as fellow local guides has lead me to research towards many burning issues in communities around the world and share my knowledge on Google maps with them too. Likewise, disseminating my knowledge on Google maps through rural communities. Especially the marginalized constituents of the society, such as kids, women, and persons with disabilities from rural areas has resulted in a heap of self-satisfaction.
Apart from these, I am now in the process of taking forward a new mission, that is, mapping the places where tribal communities live in Sri Lanka and documenting their culture and traditions while sharing those information. Exploring the lifestyle of these tribal communities has been an interesting task since the day I began. Of course, reaching their geographical locations has not been an easy task for me. However, explorations never made me feel tired. I am still in seek of such destinations and will be sharing more information in the near future on Google maps. Every year, there are many tourists who visit in seek of these tribal communities. However, when I first went through these places, only a very few places were seen and with very limited information and 360 photos of the community, which we didn’t know more about.
Also, among tourists, this concept is so famous, but when I go through Google maps, I have seen only limited information and 360 photos of the community, which we don’t know. So, I decided to host my first meetup and started mapping the community activities for Google Maps. This contribution will be helpful for tourists who like to see their activities before visiting. This is something unique and started teaching Google Maps to the tribal communities. Also, I had a goal to show the tribal communities how technologies can save our mother nature, I demonstrated how we can find the deforestation, human intervention using Google maps satellite images and how we can save those places to the maps, navigating inside the forest, etc. also I have covered a trace inside the forest, Tribal community village where they normally go for Honey gathering.
Their traditional dance was something different, and I recorded those through my camera and uploaded them to Google maps too.
As a collection of all the above aspects, I have hosted 91 meetups all together and have gathered thousands of friends throughout my local guide journey for the last five years.
Overall, I live my local guide life serenely while fulfilling my passion.
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