Capturing the colours of an island
View(s):Max Kegfire and his friends had a great time on holiday in Sri Lanka and made a video to commemorate their trip, however he was the most surprised when it went viral, he tells the Mirror Magazine
When Max Kegfire, a strawberry farmer and part-time videographer, made a short video of his trip to Sri Lanka and posted it on Youtube he wasn’t expecting it to go viral. “I did the video for myself and my friends, then some Sri Lankan guys found it and posted it on Facebook and it became kind of a wild fire – collecting in four days 50,000 + views,” he told the Mirror Magazine in an email. It’s not in the least surprising because Max’s HD video is an irresistibly sincere, fun celebration of Sri Lanka. It’s all about the people, and the food and travel – travel in trains, on foot, on bikes; its swinging from vines and climbing Sigiriya; its touching an elephant and watching a monitor lizard take off running, its walking on the beach, eating tropical fruit platters and driving through mist cloaked tea estates. The soundtrack – Paradise by Coldplay – is a perfect match for what Sri Lanka is to them.
Max is from Moldova, a small landlocked nation in Eastern Europe sandwiched between Ukraine on one side and Romania on the other. He describes himself as a passionate traveller and has already visited India, USA, Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey. The 23- year old spent five years working as a videographer (he shot weddings, commercials and documentaries) and though he’s a fruit farmer now, he still loves to make video journals of his travels. Max and his friends were in Sri Lanka from the end of February to the middle of March last year. “The weather was perfect and the only rain that caught us was in Nuwara Eliya,” says Max.
Introducing the other people in the video, he told us: “The main character in the video (the craziest guy) is Dima Viper. He is a wedding photographer in Moldova. We met each other on Flickr and became best friends. Also you can see my brother in the video, who agreed to go a few weeks before leaving. And the rest of the people are my Facebook friends. Alecsandr Podolski (the Super Man) – a very positive thinking guy, who was the heart of our travel group. Eduard Gherman (the Latino guy) – The one who has done the route for travelling (He spent Rs15,000 on buying tea). Cristina Adam – friend of Eduard Gherman. All of them decided to go the same moment I told them we were to go to Sri Lanka.”
This happy band of tourists obviously had a great time on the island. “We liked every piece of Sri Lanka: the ocean, the waves, the beaches, the tea fields, the old cities and forts. But most of all we liked the people of Sri Lanka. They are always hospitable, open, positive, smiling, cheerful and grateful. We saw in all of them a strong belief in a great future of their country,” says Max.
Max is really amazed by the responses the video has drawn. Sri Lankans have been writing to him to thank him for the video – one man who was living outside the country, wrote to say that he saw the video and decided to buy a ticket back home immediately. “I really didn’t expect to have such an impact,” says Max, who is clearly overwhelmed. “I want to thank all the Sri Lankan people for being so good to us and I’m sure that there is no other country on this planet like Sri Lanka.”
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