By Kimberly Wallace, HER Magazine
The world is full of two types of dreamers – those who are too overcome by self-doubt or fear and never take the necessary steps to work on their dreams and those who do whatever it takes to make their dreams a reality.
The latter describes Nakifa Punter, to a “T”. Apart from her full time career at a financial institution, Punter, best known as Nakifa Travels, is a globetrotter, fashion influencer, travel content creator, author and founder of the cake decorating school NC Cake Academy.
Each of the roles she inhabits is a reflection of her ambition, creativity and wanderlust. The life she has created for herself started with one girl’s dream to discover the world beyond the community she grew up in – Sans Souci.
The small village on the North East coast of Trinidad which name translates “without worry”, offers scenic ocean views and a warm community spirit where everybody knows everybody. But it wasn’t enough for Nakifa’s parents, who wanted their daughter to experience the outside world and have the life they never had, and so they pushed her to succeed at school.
Their efforts paid off; Nakifa became the first person in her school and community to pass for Bishop Anstey East. She moved to Sangre Grande to be closer to her new school. Compared to Sans Souci, Grande – with its bustling shopping districts and liming spots, where people on the way to Toco stocked up on supplies – was like a town that never slept.
At Bishop Anstey East, Nakifa blossomed. She excelled in art and became the go-to artist who did graffiti patterns on her peers’ schoolbags at the start of each academic year; her skills even earned her a feature in the newspapers.
Her artistic talents didn’t end there, in Form Six she began taking cake decorating classes from a member of her church and was soon filling orders.
By the age of 19, Nakifa was working at a bank and also pursuing a degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics at The University of the West Indies. Her life was going as she had hoped until an experience made her realise how quickly everything could come to a crashing halt.
“I said to myself: what’s the point in waiting until retirement to do something if I could do it now? I was working and had no major responsibilities so my boyfriend at the time and I started travelling,” she says.
Their first trip was to Jamaica, then the couple began planning getaways to the Middle East, Scandinavia, South and Central America. Their most memorable trip was to Turkiye, where Nakifa’s boyfriend proposed to her at sunrise in a hot air balloon 2,500 feet above the breathtaking region of Cappadocia.
Having come from the countryside, Nakifa loves travelling to places where she’s surrounded by nature.
“I feel at peace when I’m around nature, it reminds me of how small I am compared with everything else. It puts everything into perspective,” she says.
If she felt cocooned growing up in a small village, travelling made up for it by exposing her to different people, food, languages and cultures. Nakifa and her fiancé try to limit their time at hotels, choosing instead to go to areas off the beaten track where they could befriend the locals.
They would never look at Colombia the same way again, especially after having shared a beer and an eye opening conversation with a local on their recent trip to the South American country.
“Colombia is often associated with negative stereotypes like drugs and poverty, but what that man explained to us was that there was a lot of violence in Colombia during the reign of the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. It was said that he was paying people to bomb cars and many people died, therefore people were afraid to go outside, or even go to school. They didn’t see a future for themselves and so a whole generation grew up without an education,” says Nakifa. “Stories like that have helped me to see why we shouldn’t judge, it also made me more appreciative of my country. I know there are various reasons why people want to leave but we still have it nice in T&T.”
Nakifa has parlayed her love for travelling into content creation. On Tik Tok where she has the largest following she shares tips on places to visit, how to apply for visas and how to book trips without a travel agent.
Recently, she merged her passion for art and travelling and created an adult travel colouring book as well as children’s books which introduces them to the wonders of the world (a resource which Nakifa wishes she had as a child).
With her 9-5 job, cake decorating classes and an otherwise busy schedule, every hour in the influencer’s day is accounted for. But she has the satisfaction of knowing that she is living the life she had imagined.
“Life is short – so live, don’t just exist. That doesn’t mean you have to book a trip, but live in a way that makes you happy,” says Nakifa. “The longer you wait for the future you want, the less time you have to spend in it.”
