or Karen and Duncan (+70 friends) take over a small town.

This weekend is kind of hazy for me, and not just because it was almost three weeks ago, so please excuse the fragmented post.

I remember it was a long weekend and we were going to stay over for two nights. So we’d left early on the Saturday, on the highway headed east, dodging people who had gotten their licenses in Narnia, and those that were in a hurry to get to their holiday destination or meet their maker (they didn’t seem able to make up their minds). Trying to squeeze past aficionados of deep fried fat and all things greasy on our way to the next cup of caffeine at various petrol stations. Showing teeth while double-o super sexy made its very slow way up the hills.

Finally at Kaapsche Hoop, Karen hops into super sexy and shows us to our accommodation. We pass a small bar with a bright sign on the outside. She says, “That’s Salvadore’s everyone was there last night”, her tone seems to suggest that they may not have put it back together yet.

Our accommodation, Long Creek Lodge, rocks. Its clean, has beautifulI views, and it even has monogramed lamp shades – not my initials, but cool nonetheless.

I remember the wedding day being a riot of color, sound, glitter, lots and lots of confetti, mist, disco balls, magic, strange people in elvis outfits, mist, a man dressed as a reindeer, Dr Quinn medicine woman, jaeger bombs, men in kilts, and lots and lots of mist. I remember eating roast chicken off a Springbok Hit Parade (vol 4 I think?) record, and not recognizing a single name on the record label. There were also some dreadlocked horses and really huge pancakes filled with milk tart for breakfast. It was chaos, the good kind, the kind that you talk about for years, the kind that the locals talk about for years.

We snuck out early on the Monday, being very mindful of the fact that most people had still been awake a couple of hours earlier, and that hangovers were probably just starting to kick in, there was mist everywhere, the streets were strewn with confetti, I suspect that we will still be finding confetti in various parts of our camera bags for years to come.

We kind of think of Dunc and Punk as friends, so it seems a bit odd saying that they were cool to hang out with and we had an incredible time, and that we will be talking about this one for a while. Start a party indeed.

ok, so you want to see some pics, yeah?

If you’ve spent any amount of time on this blog, you’ve probably realized by now that I love driving. Driving long distances, antique cameras, late night tv and caffeine, hey you got to have some vices. So Saturday morning we hopped in the big black car, headed out into the fog and pointed it towards Gabarone. Big empty road, amazing scenery and coffee out there at the Wimpy in Koster.

I once had a chat to someone who came from Koster, his only comment was “if you swing to catch a chicken you’ll miss it”. I’m still not sure about that expression, but I suspect that it says a lot about people who grew up in Koster.

LeeAnne and Giles got married in the middle of a large piece of veld near her parents house in Phakalane, under a large tree. The reception was a private garden affair, a large tent pitched under the stars, lambs roasting on spits and tons of candles.

Hours later, the taste of the lambs still lingering on my taste buds, the sun is up again and V and I are sitting in the breakfast room at Judy’s B&B, there’s an Australian parrot called Bingo sitting on the chair next to me. I’m downing a mug of hot coffee and mentally going through the images we took the day before – there are some killer bee ones in there. I’m thinking about the drive back as the caffeine seeps into my bones, Bingo says nothing.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping a diary whenever I go on destination weddings, I have this idea in the back of my head of putting a book together or even an article for aspiring wedding photographers, but mostly its so that I can read it to V when I get back home.

This bit was written on the day of Paul and Cindi’s wedding. I was sitting on the beach, they were still dancing in the sand, I had a Kilimanjaro beer in front of me. It had been an amazing day end to end, and tomorrow I would be flying home.

“It’s 12:45am and I can feel the sweat sticking my shirt to my back. 12:45am!!! Its damn hot on the west coast of Zanzibar, the kind of hot that would make Tarzan want to go home. On the beach in front of me is a vocalist who sounds an awful lot like someone who learned English from a second language English speaker from an ex-communist country is annunciating the lyrics to Satisfaction … she misses the I can’t get no girl reaction line and substitutes another Aye cont geyt no say tease phaction … it sounds perfect for tonight. I take a photo of the bride and groom against the full moon and the beached hulls of the boats we came in on, leaving the shutter open to try and maximize the ambient light. I hear the shutter click shut just as she segues into Creedance Clearwater Revival. It’s been a hell of a day, Zanzibar style and I’m sunburnt and exhausted. I smile at a couple on the dance floor, seconds later my hangover kicks in. In about 5 hours the muezzin will be calling the faithful to prayer, loud enough to wake me up.”

I ended up shooting over 5000 images on the three days I was on the island, way too many amazing pics to show here. So just a couple from me. I took my Eura Ferrania with, so maybe a couple of arty images later.

They had the most amazing baobabs on the island, huge huge trees, and they were green and heavy with fruit. I’d never seen fruit on a baobab before.

UPDATE: I posted a couple of pics from the Ferrania on my non-wedding photoblog.

OK, Zanzibar was amazing and Paul and Cindi’s wedding was in the words of one guest … incredible. Coasting along the sea in a wooden boat to Kwale Island, watching elephant shrew outside my room, listening to the monkeys going ballistic on my roof at night, trying to hear the words of the priest over the roar of the ocean … all incredible memories.

Cindi and Paul were total rockstars, they even looked like rockstars, insisted on photographs with the baobab, and in the village – my kind of couple. Thank you both for your hospitality and warmth, the love and friendship of your friends and family are a reflection of your love for each other. I can’t think of a more perfect place for the two of you to get married than on the edge of a deserted island in the Indian Ocean, surrounded by your friends and family.

More in a day or so … btw if you’re a Nikon geek, my two Nikons, one which was recently calibrated and the other which is brand new, did not deal well with the massive amounts of light and contrast in Zanzibar. I ended up switching everything to manual and going old school.

I’m finally back from Zanzibar, which was beautiful and exotic and all the things you expect from a tropical island on the edge of Africa. Give me a couple of hours to unpack my bags, answer the 212 emails in my mailbox, and get the beach sand out of my camera bag and I’ll tell you all about Cindi and Paul’s wedding on Kwale Island. Until then, I did manage to do some work on the flight back. No, my fear of flying hasn’t gone away and yes I still fly tranquilized, but for some reason the tranquilizers weren’t working on the way back, so I edited photos.