There are various ways to get married in the South African Drakensberg Mountains. You can hike yourself to the top, but when you ditch an expensive wedding venue, hiring a helicopter can be within your budget. So that’s exactly what Rebecca & Chris decided to do: a helicopter elopement in South Africa. Spot the snow! 

When Rebecca contacted me, her fiancé Chris was at work somewhere in Central Africa. He was going to be away for months, so we relied on modern comms with sketchy signal to plan an entire elopement while doing the distance. I can still remember one of the first calls we had. I was in The Netherlands at the time, Rebecca in Canada and Chris in a country of which I’m not sure I’m allowed to disclose. We planned it all, while spread out across the world. In this blog you can read how this inquiry became a helicopter elopement in South Africa!

Elopement wedding in the Drakensberg, South Africa

It started with a brainstorm about Uganda vs. Iceland but somehow we ended up in The Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa… How? I’m not completely sure anymore, but we did! It’s all part of what I do. Help you figure out where in the world you want to elope if you’re not quite sure yet. At some point, while considering all the options on their list, Rebecca mentioned: “Why don’t we just come to you? Is South Africa a good place to elope?” I think my answer to that became a voicenote in podcast format. But it summarised into: HECK YES.

Rockeries hiking route 

After diving into my network of Drakensberg experts we organised ourselves with stunning accommodation at the foot of the mountain and… a helicopter. 

After only a few months time I found myself at OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg, where I met my two travellers at Quills restaurant, part of the Intercontinental Hotel. Rebecca and Chris had met up in Uganda, seeing each other again for the first time in months. After spending time with gorillas and having an amazing safari experience, they continued their travels to South Africa to elope with me.
Meanwhile, I stayed in touch with our helicopter pilot about the next two days because the weather in ‘The Berg’, can get interesting which could have us end up stuck on ground level. Luckily the weather was looking fly, so that’s exactly what we did. Our helicopter elopement in South Africa was about to take off.

Helicopter flight to Mnweni, Drakensberg 

I knew instantly where I wanted to fly to: Mnweni. It took about twenty minutes for the pilot to get us to our destination. On the way there, we flew over Rockeries, a hiking route to the very same Mnweni-area I used for a Drakensberg hiking elopement a year earlier. My feet felt it back then and now I could actually see from up above how far, steep, dramatic, and overall ridiculously extreme that was indeed. 

We landed. It had snowed a few days before, so we all got to experience our very first African snow. Bizarre, in all those years in Africa I had never seen snow up close on this continent before.

Time to elope!

What all that looked like, you can see for yourselves below 🙂