Our African Wedding

Weddings | Top Wedding Spots | Honeymoons |

Choosing our wedding
Inviting Friends & Family
The Wedding Trip
The Big Day
What it cost

Choosing our wedding
Paul and I looked had actually already looked at wedding venues here in the UK, but whenever we mentioned possible venues to family and friends there always seemed to be differences of opinion about what would be best. 

We wanted friends and family at our wedding too, so had not really considered having the wedding abroad.  But after the difficulties agreeing to a venue, and the surprisingly high costs in the UK, we decided to take matters into our own hands and find somewhere abroad.

We both wanted to do a safari for the honeymoon, so the first option we considered was simply having the wedding on safari and combining it with the honeymoon.  And what a great idea it turned out to be…. 

We contacted three tour operators who specialised in safaris, and ended up choosing Imagine Africa (who friends had also recommended).  Ben from Imagine Africa had first hand experience arranging weddings in all the different countries we looked at.  With Bens help we were able to compare different options in terms of cost, and which had the simplest formalities (arranging marriage certificates etc). 

All this was done over email (Imagine Africa wanted to do a full presentation for us in their offices, we are rarely in London – but didn’t seem to matter for us, email was fine) and in less than 10 days we had a shortlist of a safari lodge in either Kenya or in South Africa.  In the end we chose Garonga Safari Camp, in South Africa because:

> The lodge had done weddings before, and could handle all the formalities (Ministers fee, preparation of legal marriage documents).
> They were able to arrange a photographer
> It met our price criteria
> It was a small lodge (only 8 rooms) and they were 100% happy to tailor the wedding completely our wishes. 
> They had a member of their management team who became our ‘wedding co-ordinator’.  Her name was Vanessa and nothing was too much trouble (we emailed her numerous times with silly questions in the months leading up to the wedding), and she successfully arranged a photographer, an amazing wedding cake, and some gorgeous flowers.
> They were very flexible about holding rooms for our guests – this was really important (see below).

Inviting Friends and Family.
We always knew we wanted to invite some close friends, and members of both our families.  Whilst we did not want them to feel any pressure to fly all the way to South Africa, we also wanted to make coming to the wedding was as exciting a proposition as possible, so with Bens help, Imagine Africa were able to create a web page just for our guests which had all the wedding information, with pictures of the Safari Camp, the activities it had on offer, and all the costs and timings for flights if guests were going to fly out. 

Our friends and family were a key reason why we opted for a South Africa wedding rather than Kenya one.  South Africa offered scope for all our guests to go off and travel on their own holidays (Pauls brother and family went to Cape Town, and then flew to Mauritius, my parents hired a car and drop round practically all of South Africa!)

We had picked Garonga Safari Camp because of course we loved it – but there were some important practical boxes that it ticked: it was easily accessible (no expensive private charter flights or anything like that), it was very good value compared to other safari lodges, and the owner was willing to block off 6 of his rooms for an agreed period of time when our friends and family were still deciding on whether or not to come out for the wedding.  This last aspect was very important for us.  My family are not the best decision makers in the world, so we needed a travel company that were able to keep rooms free even though we didn’t know if we’d need them at all.  We agreed how long we could hold off the rooms with Ben, and he did the rest.  In the end we booked 4 rooms for guests, and were able to release the other 2 rooms we didn’t need with no penalty.

The Wedding Trip
Once we’d decided that Garonga was the place for us - arranging the rest of the trip was straightforward.  Ben had given us two or three different suggestions for what we could do after the wedding – all sounded great, but in the end we chose to travel up to the Northern Mozambique Coast to spend 10 days at a remote beach lodge. 

We’d also looked at Mauritius, but in the end Mozambique won the day as we really wanted to ‘get away from it all’ and although Mauritius initially looked like a cheaper option - Ben was able to get a big ‘honeymoon’ discount from the lodge we were staying at – which was called Guludo (which we loved by the way – see our “Trip Advisor” review if you are interested), so it ended up costing about the same.  I don’t think they offer that at standard, so Imagine Africa came up trumps there.

So to summarize we ended up doing 5 days at Garonga Safari Camp (with the wedding on the third day) then 8 nights at Guludo Lodge. 

The Big Day
We were married on the 7th July at 11h30 am.  I don’t know were to start in describing the day. 

It smashed all my expectations to smithereens – there were so many unexpected pleasures to the day, and little touches that made us both feel so special. 

Paul wore a traditional suit (as did his brother the best man), and I had a simple ankle length white wedding dress.  Garonga had arranged done all our laundry and pressed my dress (another thing I’d been worried about, but again handled with ease by the Garonga team). 

We’d decided on a non religious ceremony and had prepared our own vows.  Everything ran like clockwork (we’d had a quick rehearsal the day before).  We arrived at the ceremony in safari vehicle that had been temporarily transformed into an amazing wedding carriage, and watched by 11 close friend and family (Pauls brother, wife and teenage son were with us, as were both our parents, a grand parent and three other friends of ours) as well as a number of the Garonga Staff we’d got to know, I became Mrs Plowman !!

What it cost
Our Wedding / Honeymoon itinerary cost £3,760 per person.  That was for 5 days at Garonga Safari Camp and then 8 nights at Guludo Lodge in Mozambique. 

Additionally we paid a £275 fee Garonga charged for making all the arrangements, and just under £300 for the photographer (and 50 large colour photos in an album) cost £300.  At the last minute we also decided to have the wedding filmed and put on DVD, again Garonga arranged this and this cost £271.

So in total we spent less than £8,366 on the whole wedding AND the honeymoon.  Paul worked out that having the wedding in the UK would have cost us a minimum of £15,000, and added to the cost of the honeymoon (£7,000), it meant that we overall we saved a whopping £13,500!

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