The Argentine-born graphic and product designer is the founder and creative director of Toronto’s Blok Design, an award-winning studio celebrated for its blend of creativity, culture and storytelling. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and Washington’s Library of Congress. As daring in her travel as her design, here she shares her experience of Sri Lanka.

My Passion

I am an adventurer at heart – a poetic wanderer with a deep love for the arts and humanity. I am moved by the invitation to see differently and to discover the nuances in the simple everyday gestures of the unknown. Travel is my way of embodying freedom. It brings a world of textures, colours and forms that awaken all my senses. Some of the more far-flung places I have been to are Mongolia, Cambodia, Russia and Tunisia.

My Favourite Place

Sri Lanka remains one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve had with my two kids, Uma and Luka. It isn’t just the landscape’s diversity but the richness of each encounter: riding an old train through the mist to the tea plantations, dancing and playing drums with a master dancer, then sharing a meal with his family, where we learned the right way to cook curry and how to eat with our hands.

This island was a constant surprise. Learning about the many rituals and experiencing both Hindu and Buddhist ceremonies was simply otherworldly. We made our “promises” in both religions – where you ask for something and leave the orange or white string around your wrist as a reminder. Luka still has his three years later. 

I like to really immerse myself in the country I’m in. So we even stayed in a two-bedroom house near Rambas Reserve, an ecological reservoir surrounded by nature and its many guests – from macaques to Jurassic-sized snails – some of which actually showed up in our open-air bedroom. It was both magnificent and humbling and it made us realize how truly disconnected we are from the natural world: from elephants that run free across the land, to monkeys staring back at us, to the leeches that tried so hard to jump into our boots – some actually made it in!

If You Buy One Thing

Spices and tea. There is a taste, a scent that finds you at every stop along the dusty road – the pepper, the cinnamon, the warm smell of Sri Lanka itself. The colours in the market and the fragrance in the air become inseparable from the temples, the architecture and life itself.

Seeing is Believing

We celebrated my daughter’s 16th birthday by meditating and chanting at the Dambulla Cave Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to over 150 Buddha statues. Yet what stayed with me most was not the grandeur but a quiet encounter: a man who shared how cleaning the temple floors was his form of meditation, moving humbly among the most incredible Buddhas, high atop the mountain.

Savvy Traveller Tip

As much as we believe our medicine is so advanced, it was the Ayurvedic remedies and the local doctors, who cleared whatever bug we arrived with from our systems. And, after nearly a month on the island, I came home with every medicinal tea I could get my hands on.

My Takeaway

I was genuinely surprised by Sri Lanka: the generosity of its people, the incredible food we ate and shared, the diversity of its fruits – including the buttery sweet “King of Mangoes”, the Maha Chanok (gifted to Sri Lanka as a seedling from Thailand in the 1976) – and how different every place we visited felt. It was layers of history, spirituality and nature all stacked on top of one another, moving beautifully together. And if not effortlessly, it felt true – messy, textured; and that, for me, is the gift of travelling: discovering what is essential to a place, and to the heart.

From Vanessa

According to Vanessa, don’t miss Trincomalee, a peninsula in the less travelled northeast of Sri Lanka with pristine beaches, incredible marine life (it’s a prime spot for blue-whale watching), delicious seafood and a spectacular Hindu temple, Koneswaram, perched on top of a cliff.

Also, she advises, if you’re visiting at the right time of year, try to get to Kandy’s spectacular 10-day Esala Perahera festival, held in July or August, to honour the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha. The streets come alive with Kandyan dancers, fire-breathers, musicians and torchbearers while elaborately adorned elephants draped in bright fabrics and lights parade through the city.

It’s also worth finding extra space in your luggage. “As a family,” Vanessa explains, “we always put a lot of intention into buying one or two objects that will bring us back to a place. I bought a beautiful, finely hand-painted wooden box – it’s orange with silver elephants going around the edge. It’s very decorative and a constant reminder of our time there. We also bought two wooden stupas (religious domes) that you walk around three times, honouring the three “jewels” of Buddhism as a walking meditation. We tried to embrace and learn about the rituals, and be open to participating in as many ways as we could.”