About Us
Laura
I am Laura, Yue in Chinese, Yuma among the Attayal natives. I’m a hiking guide, graduated in Sinology, and passionate about sports, mountains, anthropology, and learning highly useful endangered languages – cause you never know when you might need one!
I started hiking in the Alps as a child, beginning in my native regions of Liguria and Piedmont, motivated by the promise of fried chips at the mountain hut or the idea of playing with tadpoles in the ponds. When these incentives were absent, my dad’s shoulders became the only solution. At 14, something changed; I began climbing the crags of Finale Ligure, just a step away from home, and continued exploring the alpine environment in the Dolomites and the Eastern Alps, transitioning from anchoring on my dad’s shoulders to anchoring to the rock.
In 2017, I landed in Taiwan for a university exchange program, where I didn’t give up my weekly mountain outings and fell in love with its national parks, peaks, wild nature, and -alas- even a local indigenous man from the Attayal tribe. That’s how I began my journey as a hiking guide on the Formosan mountains, working alongside porters and guides from the tribe. A few years later, following this irrational passion for ethnic minorities of Asian mountaineers, I crossed the strait and began exploring the Tibetan Plateau among the Kham and Jiarong Tibetan groups.
My interest in the philosophies and traditions of the Far East led me to also approach Indian ones, and thus I became a yoga teacher.
I love sharing my passion for Asia and my wonder in learning about its cultures, to allow everyone to experience the emotion of exploring these distant natural environments and uncover their secrets.
Combining yoga with walking immersed in nature is one of my favorite practices. I like to transmit and share the benefits, freedom, and emotions it brings, guiding people on hikes with me to balance the body, open the mind, and realize we are one with our surroundings.
When I’m not hiking or cycling, I teach skiing in the Swiss Alps, although at heart I’m a snowboarder (and I’d like to point out that, in reality, instead of skiing, 90% of my time is spent reinserting gloves and blowing kids’ noses). You can also find me in improbable positions on the yoga mat, studying some other extremely useful semi-dead language, or reading diaries of crazy anthropologists from other times.
