Our Wedding

How to have a perfect wedding. First, find the perfect partner. Next, wander around the world for a year and get engaged somewhere along the way--say, for instance, in Golden Bay, New Zealand. Now, daydream together for a few months about where a little, slightly random wedding might occur naturally. Then, go to Africa. Drive around the Cape and the Karoo. Drive all over Namibia, from the Kalahari to the Skeleton Coast. Meet kindly, enthusiastic new friends along the way. Have a Herrero wedding dress made from scratch in a rough-and-tumble town called Opuwo. Pick up an antique Himba man's "tie" made of leather, iron, and springbok hair. Settle on getting married in a balloon over the Namib desert. Finally--and this is the tricky part--have serendipity intervene in some wildly unexpected way, so that the perfect wedding ends up being planned for you and all you have to do is show up and be happy.

In our case, we arrived at the place we were to get married, Sossusvlei, only to find that no one there remembered they had promised us a balloon wedding. This bit of trauma led to a quick scurry down the road to another place where they said they could "organize a wedding" for us in just a day. (A quintessentially Namibian expression, that--to "organize" something--from a beer at the bar to the rest of your life, Namibians don't just do it, they organize it.)

And that other place, now there's the sweet, serendipitous miracle. Welcome to Wolvedans, 

(Africaans for Wolf den  because of the large number of hyenas in the area) a quiet resort in the vast heart of the Namib Rand Preserve. We would say a "tiny resort," because the accommodations are few, but tiny is not the right word when those few accommodations are scattered over a property that is the size of Manhattan and populated with many more zebras, springboks, giraffes and oryx than humans. 

No pedestrian crossing signs here....only giraffe & zebra!

Nor is tiny the right word for any of those few accommodations themselves, not when our honeymoon suite looked like this:

From the moment we arrived, there was no more wedding planning for us to do. We were welcomed by Hermann Cloete', a bear of a man who speaks a fistful of languages, is descended from Italians, French, Swedes, and English, has lived among Bushmen and Maasai, and seems to have been designed by higher powers to transform simple elopements into magical rituals. His personality is calm and in control, but he never stopped reminding us that it was his privilege to be asked to do this wedding for us. He has a master's in psychology. He spent a large part of his life as a tailor of women's wedding gowns. He's spent most of the rest of his life in this very desert, as a nature guide. He's one part Gandalf, one part Jeeves, and one part Lion King. And he has a little dog, too. . . .

So, that's how you do it. To have the perfect wedding, get lost in Namibia, have someone loose your reservations, throw your plans out the window, and arrive in the kingdom of Hermann. Oh, not only of Hermann, but of Hermann and Naughty. Yes, at Wolvedans, our surrogate grandmother-of-the-bride, in-house chef, confidante, Herrero seamstress extraordinaire, and assistant wizard of the wedding (and our private in house cook) was a woman whose name, whose REAL name, is Naughty.

But before we get back to Naughty and Hermann and the wedding itself (not to say the Wolvedans staff choir!), here's a quick look at what the surroundings were like. Excuse us if we say that this may be the most delectable desert landscape on earth--no fences, no cattle, no contrails overhead. Just the "long-legged Bushman's grass" spotted with "fairy circles," the free mountain of Losberg, the horizons that defy the depth perception of digital cameras and human eyes alike. And there we were, for two unexpected days in a place we hadn't known or imagined one day earlier, in a house of our own in the midst of it. . . .

Ah, so that was the setting. Here, as promised, is our fairy godmother, Naughty, on the morning of our wedding day, arriving with magic slippers in hand for the bride, ready to get started on the preparations.

And here is one of Naughty's elves, the well-named Eugenia, replete with bag of needles and thread, at work at the manufacture of one of Sarah's numerous petticoats. (Herrero women, sources agree, require a goodly number of petticoats under their floating skirts. Sources disagree whether the minimum such number is 5, 7 or 9 petticoats. Sarah's, in any case, were sewn on the spot.)

By early afternoon, this was the result of so much organizing. . . . Sarah in her golden wedding gown, on the porch of the honeymoon cabin.

Forthwith, Hermann arrived with Norman (pilot and wedding photographer) to drive us in the wedding carriage to our secret destination. Hermann would only tell us that it was his "special place."

So, this was Hermann's "special place." That glowing sea is grass in the late afternoon light, stretching unbroken for miles and miles around. The good folks awaiting us are the Wolvedans staff choir.

The bride and groom, in front of their carriage. The groom's "tie" is Himba, his shirt Owambo, his bracelet Ju'hoansi ostrich-shell manufacture, his walking stick Oshiwambo. The bride's dress and hat are Herrero with Damara influences. Her bouquet is made of desert flowers and grasses. The chapel is the open sky and the red sand of the Namib, oldest of all the world's deserts.

Hermann, now ready to marry us, precedes the wedding party, cloaked in his Maasai robe. 

The brides makes her way down the aisle she's never seen before. . . 

Bride and groom meet near the altar. We'll let the pictures from the service speak for themselves.

And now it's time to have a little wedding party. . . .

But, before we all call it a night, a quick look back at what the ride to the party looked like on the carriage ride through the Namib cathedral . . . .

. . . and the next morning we woke up happy and married under another fantastic dawn. We wish we could have had everyone we know and love with us on that magic day, but we hope that we will have many opportunities to share our married life with all of you! Love & Joy, Sarah and Mark

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