22nd – 31st  January 2013

After such an amazing Christmas leaving for Africa was so hard.

We were sad to be saying farewells to our families all over again but at least this time I knew we would be back soon…albeit to say yet another goodbye!

BUT, as I have explained before, we were also SO excited to be flying to South Africa…and with Alex’s Mum!

Janet had decided after being sick of listening to us going on about our amazing adventures and all the wonderful people we meet that she would quite like an adventure too! So we all put our heads together and came up with a way that she could travel the globe, meet like-minded people and do the thing that she loves. PAINT PEOPLE!

Before long Janet came up with the idea of travelling around the world, meeting up with portrait painters and painting portraits of people that she meets on her way. The inspiration came from a picture we took of a fisherman at our Chilean wedding! He had the perfect face for a portrait, Janet painted him and as he hung on the wall in her home we all often wondered about his story, where did he come from? who is he? what is his story…so, 102 faces was born and Janet was taking the first steps of her very own adventure with us as a self confessed ‘comfort blanket’ for a little support on the very first leg! BUT; you can read all about Janet’s story on her website…back to the adventure in question!

We decided to first fly into Cape Town, South Africa as had several contacts on the ground who had been planing weddings for our arrival!
We landed, soaked up the sunshine like sponges after a long British winter and a long flight, dropped our bags at our hotel and hit the waterfront for lunch.

The V&A waterfront was very European. Beautiful bars, beautiful people and modern restaurants lined the waters edge and the smell of good food and the sound of chinking wine glasses rang all around us. We were hungry so stopped for food…and of course to sample the famous South African wine…that is where our week in Cape Town started and pretty much how we spent the next 7 days, eating great food and drinking great wine with great company. On a global scale this was the cheapest place we had been so far…and with so much style! We were eating great meals, fresh seafood, game and great steaks for under £10 a plate and drinking wine that blew our minds for less. We were sucked in and really made the most of our first week in South Africa with Janet. We even went to see the penguins! Yes, Penguins…in Africa! Who knew? Not me! They were VERY cute and very relaxed about us being on their beach!

We did get SOME ‘work’ done, we met with the reporter for YOU magazine, sourced, tried and came home with 2 wedding dresses from amazing African wedding dress designer Elbeth Gillis AND met with our wedding team for our first wedding in Africa!

More about the dresses to come, first the wedding planning!

Photographer Kristina Stojilijkovic had been in touch with Alex for some time arranging 2 weddings that both screamed Cape Town. One typical Afrikaans and the other in the biggest township in Cape Town, Khayelitsha.
We were so excited to explore these extremely different cultures and of course to learn more.

Kristina is a little different to our previous photographers as she is also a fashion photographer rather than full time in weddings. We were really excited to see things from her perspective and she was enjoying challenging herself by pulling together a shoot…with that extra important part…a wedding!

Herself and her partner in crime in team Blink Photography, Annameike teamed up with stylist Anika Olaf and they decided on an era, researched locations, made up story boards and planned ‘stories’ to shoot and then teamed up with Make up artist Debbie Jean…our Cape Town wedding dream team was born.

We met with the gang and looked at the pictures they had taken on their reckie into Khayelitsha and to a couple of farms where they wanted to hold the wedding and take some shots.
Their excitement for the shoot was clear and their vision incredible. They explained to us that they had been unable to secure an Afrikaans minister to hold a wedding for us as it is a very strict ‘religion’ and our adventure was a little too difficult to explain, however, the people they had contacted in Khayelitsha had loved the idea and many of the neighbours had offered their help in recreating a modern township ceremony for us there.

We agreed that as long as we had one ceremony planned we would still do both shoots to show the extreme difference between the two clashing cultures and how they looked in early 1900’s.

Kristina and Annamieke discussed with us the safety issues in Khayelitsha and explained more in detail about the townships.

In the times of the apartheid the blacks (people are described by the colour of their skin openly in SA) were forced into townships like second class citizens. They were forced to use different buses, different benches and different bathrooms, they were pushed aside by the whites. Today, the racial segregation has been abolished and some of the black and coloured people of Cape Town have left the townships, many remain.
There are townships all over the country. Dusty, tiny, rundown shacks built so closely together that in some places they are literally on top of each other. Tin, wood, plastic, scraps of whatever they can find are pushed together to create makeshift shelters that are called home. Rocks thrown onto rushes or plastic thrown over the shacks hold the roof onto the structure when the wind blows but nothing stops the water creeping up the walls when that comes down hard…and it does!

Kristina warned that although everyone will make us welcome as visitors, we should always be wary and not forget where we are. The townships are a place of extreme poverty and with poverty comes hardships, family and turf violence and in such small knit communities one can suddenly find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

all of this said, Khayelitsha when we visited was filled with some of the friendliest and happiest people we have ever met, but more about that later.

Our weddings planned, our press interviews complete we just had to find some accommodation for the rest of our stay in South Africa.
We were missing Peggy already and really really wanted to see as much of the continent as we could during our short 2 month visit. We planned to visit several of South Africa’s neighbouring countries and began to look at hiring a camper.
Its the only way to travel for us and I would recommend, as always, the best way to see the real deal!

As much as the prices for food and wine were incredibly cheap…alas the campers were way out of our small budget. We reached out to several places asking for deals and with a little help from our friends (Gardner Hamilton) we were put into touch with Manon at Bobo campers. Manon offered to lend us a small camper for a month free of charge!

We were gobsmacked…she reiterated that it was small but we didn’t care, we were blown away and prior to her call had started to wonder if we would see much of Africa at all with the camper prices we had been quoted.
We jumped at the chance, thanked Manon and Gardner profusely and arranged to collect our SMALL camper in a few days.

BUT first, we had some dresses to find.
As well as arranging weddings with Kristina in Cape Town, Alex had also been in touch with Andrew Elliot in Grahamstown on the Eastern Cape and we had plans for weddings there too…for which we would need a modern white wedding dress.
I knew who I wanted to ask straight away and emailed the details of our adventure to Elbeth Gillis in the hope that she might be willing to lend me a dress. She literally replied within 3 minutes of receiving my email and invited us to go and try on!

Elbeth had seen our adventure in the Marie Claire magazine in December and THAT was surreal! Elbeth creates stunning pieces, from timeless classics to amazing materials, modern shapes, short, tailored…and when we arrived Elbeth was as cool as a cucumber as I blabbered on with panic and nerves.

I tried on 5 dresses and couldn’t for the life of me choose between two of them. One a lace overlay fitted body and gorgeous skirts with incredible detail on every inch of fabric and the other simple white elegance with flowing skirts and two trains attached to the low back of the dress…they both spoke to me but were so different…after nearly tearing myself in two with Janet and Alex both giving their opinions but none of us making a firm decision Elbeth told me to just take both. I could have kissed her but I managed to restrain myself…JUST!

When our week of hotel luxury was over we packed up our room (which when we left smelled like a dead rat as we had bought some stinky cheese and stashed it in our mini bar), left the wedding dresses with Janet, hired a car, zipped over to collect our new home for a month and were introduced to MYRTLE! Our teeny tiny camper that was just perfect for us!

A small suzuki jimini with the back transformed into a fridge and storage with a small pop up tent on the top! It was 4 wheel drive, had a gas bottle that turned into a stove attached to the back of the bumper and our bags fit in! We were away!

We immediately felt free again! As much as we had loved spending a week in a flash hotel (thanks Mum Janet) we were free as birds again, out on the open roads, seeing the real South Africa!

We had a week to kill before our shoot and wedding with Kristina and gang so we hit the road west for our first African adventure!