Our new family adventure in Cape Town is with Twin Venture.
How 29-year old identical twins Busi and Gugu decided to start a business offering quad-biking and sand-boarding in the Atlantis dunes, is a story of inspiration. And what more perfect name could they have chosen for their adventure travel company than Twin Venture!
They visited Cape Town from their hometown of Johannesburg in November 2021 and went quad biking in the Atlantis sand dunes of the Witzands Aquifer Nature Reserve. “We fell in love with the place,” they say in unison. These two girls are not the kind of people to let the grass grow under their feet and they returned just a month later to formulate a new chapter in their life and start their very own adventure business. Their goal, to run quad-biking and dune boarding activities in the white powder sand of the Atlantis dunes. So firm were they in their conviction, that their quad bikes arrived in Cape Town before they did.
“It was a quick decision because we both felt God was guiding us to this land. We are spiritually led and the moment we left the dunes that day we never felt the same. We just knew we had to come back.”
Their family in Johannesburg thought they were mad. “It felt like a crazy vision, but we knew it was right. If we’d listened to others we wouldn’t be here now.” They left their family and moved to Cape Town, then jumped into the deep end of starting a new enterprise from scratch, calling on their marketing and relationship building backgrounds. “It was all new for us; the tourism industry, adventure operating, getting agents to sell our services, but everything came together.”
The Witzands Aquifer Nature Reserve protects the precious underground water source that supplies the local communities, and there are sometimes shimmering pools at the base of the dunes. The 500 hectares of pure white sand dunes rolling into the distance, may look like empty desert, but there are birds, small buck, mongooses, moles and caracal. And the area is environmentally important for its endangered Cape Flats dune strandveld and critically endangered Atlantis sand fynbos. You’d never expect to find such a magical dunescape so close to Cape Town and as Busi and Gugu can attest, it’s absolutely spellbinding.
“As I look back,” reflects Busiswe, “I know we were right to trust God and apply our strengths and believe in ourselves.” If enthusiasm and self-confidence are must-have attributes for entrepreneurs, then these twin sisters are well blessed. But they also have the other qualities needed to succeed in a small adventure tourism business, like determination, hard work and unflinching self-confidence.
The twins’ enthusiasm for life and new adventures is an attitude that has brought them to an unexpected place, but isn’t that the power that new experiences can bring? Go and have fun quad biking and dune boarding with Busi & Gugu and see where life takes you from there!
By, Carrie Hampton