NEW FRONTIERS

From embarking on off-grid expeditions to steering a fintech firm, CAECILIA CHU's life is one big adventure - but a fresh year marks changes for her heart and business.

- RACHEL GENEVIEVE CHIA

Night in the Amazon. She canoes down the Napo, gliding over black water, as hundreds of frogs embedded in the bush call out, one after another, in surround sound. Beneath the surface, shoals of piranhas sleep, their orange underbellies invisible in the stygian current.

Rowing down a river infested with vicious fish may seem like a business school-type exercise, the kind reserved for Wharton undergraduates like Caecilia Chu to build mental and physical strength. But not for Caecilia, for whom this is a spontaneous leisure activity.

But this is hardly a one-off trip for the finance grad. In the years to come, there will be many such adrenaline-filled escapades, like the time she ziplines down the Brazil end of Iguazu Falls, or the time she snowmobiles across Icelandic terrain in search of crystalline ice caverns.

Then there's the time she tries falconry on the outskirts of Dubai; the time she charters a small plane for panoramic views of the Alaska Range's rugged massif - particularly Denali, the world's coldest mountain. And the time (admittedly, a very different time from now) when she roams through Bethlehem in Palestine's West Bank.

“I travel for adventure,” Caecilia says. Now 41 and CEO of a travel fintech company, she has not changed in her tastes. This year, the one annual leisure getaway she allots herself is reserved for Courchevel, a ski resort in France's Tarentaise valley, where her family of four, including two children aged 8 and 10, will conquer the slopes of the Alps.

“VERY CRAZY THINGS”

Perhaps an adventurous spirit is required to throw off the comforting mantle of corporate success to strike out alone. A knack for math, and scholarships to America's top schools, first catapulted Caecilia – the daughter of a postman and a kindergarten teacher living in low-income housing in Hong Kong – to the upper echelons of corporate life, with stops at McKinsey, Citi, and two Chinese fintech firms.