Wedding in South Africa

I’m leaving today for a two-week trip to South Africa to see my sister get married. Very excited!

It’s my first time to South Africa, first time in Africa even. Actually, it’s my first time travelling to the Southern Hemisphere. I’ll have to remember to check if the toilet flushes anti-clockwise. I’ll add that to my to-do list. I have a whole itinerary of things to do so it’ll be an action packed two weeks.

Wedding

The main reason I’m going is obviously for my sister Sarah’s wedding. She got engaged earlier this year to a decent chap called Hilton, an SA native. They’d planned to get married around Christmas (the middle of summer) but it worked out better to have it earlier as it brought the overall cost down.

The wedding itself is at a seaside resort called Ballito, about half an hour up the cost from Durban and overall about an hour or so from where Sarah lives in Pietermaritzburg. It should be nice and hot there despite being mid Spring. I’ve been checking the weather and it’s mid-twenties most days with very high humidity so I’ll have to slap on the suncream!

There’s a small group of us going – myself, Valerie, Mum and Dad, my brother and his wife and kids and three women from my church. We have a very long trip to get there, basically:

Belfast → Gatwick (6 hour wait)
Gatwick → Dubai (3 hour wait)
Dubai → Durban
Durban → Ballito

It’s about a day and a half of a journey, and I’m really not looking forward to it. When I made the trip to San Francisco in 2007 it took 23 hours and I’ve never been more tired in my life so I’m hoping it won’t be just as bad. By the time this post goes out I should be arriving in Gatwick kicking about for a few hours (thanks to excellent planning from my Mum to make sure we definitely won’t miss our Dubai flight…).

Holiday Plan

Since it’s such a long way, it would be a shame to go and not make a holiday of it so Valerie and I will be travelling round a good bit both before and after the wedding.

In the week before, we’ll be heading to the Drakensburg mountains for a day or two of hiking and stuff. Not exactly sure what exactly we’re doing (you can tell who organized the majority of the trip) but I think we’re spending two or three days there. Then we’re heading north for a safari over two days. Really looking forward to that!

Then, of course, there’s the main event as it were and after everyone is heading off home again. Valerie and I will be taking a different flight in the direction of Cape Town for the remaining week. There we’ll visit Robben Island, Table Mountain and a bunch of other stuff slightly further afield. I believe an ostrich farm is on the agenda. I hear Cape Town is a good spot to get biltong too, so I’ll have to give that a bash.

Like I did with the trip to Paris, I’m going to make a little mini-series of the trip and will try to update the a few times over the fortnight. I’m very pleased to have my new camera to take with me too, so I’ll get some photos up on Flickr too if I get the chance – internet connection in SA is predictably poor so I’ll do my best. At worst I’ll type it all up when I’m back home.

That’s all for now. See you all in two weeks!

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