Best friends Bernie and Petra live on different continents but their passion for travel has led to a surprise new joint venture…
“When someone says it to us, we can hardly believe it ourselves, and we struggle to contain our giggles. But yes, somehow, through a few happy accidents of fate, we have become Instagram influencers – in our 50s!
The fact that we’re best friends who managed to turn our shared passion for travel into an influential Instagram profile and website (or ‘digital magazine’ as we like to call it – we can’t stand the word ‘blog’!) is just the cherry on top.
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Now, with our kids all grown-up and off creating their own stories, we’re travelling the world and staying in some of the most sought-after locations on Earth, from Lake Como to Cape Town – and somehow we managed to bring nearly 11 000 followers along for the ride.
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The Take-Off
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But let’s take you back in time and tell you how this happy accident happened. We’re best friends Bernie van der Linde from South Africa and Petra Top from Germany. Bernie is the principal of a private higher learning institution in Joburg (who completed her PhD last year), and Petra is involved with the development of electric cars in Germany.
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Everyone in both of our families is obsessed with motorsport, and – surprise, surprise! – we met at a motorsport event in Germany eight years ago.
We hit it off right away and started travelling together, around Europe, SA and the world, three or four times a year (as our children grew up and we had more spare time – and spare money!).
We launched our Instagram account (@travelbuddies_lifestyle) in October 2020, in the wake of those first hard and difficult lockdowns, and our aim was really just to diarise our adventures. We never put pictures up of ourselves. We would write all about this beautiful place, but it was very cold and distant. It wasn’t a personal story that we were telling. But when we changed it a little and posted a picture of us and added, ‘We enjoyed the ice cream. The beach was nice’, then people really started engaging with us.
Keeping It Real
We realised early on that what our followers were responding to was our authenticity.
With influencers, it’s always about looking great in photos. You see them prancing through Venice in night gowns. But that’s not who we are or want to project. We are just humans with insecurities. Petra will see a post and say, ‘Bernie, how could you do this to me? Look at my face! Look at my wrinkles!’ And I will say, ‘But Petra, look at my bum! You took the worst picture of my bum!’
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But it’s not about us, it’s about our experiences. And that’s a difference that comes from our age compared to other influencers. We are a bit different. We can be in the most awful situations but we manage to always have fun because it’s how we view the world and how we see things. Everything goes well when you’re in the right frame of mind –and that’s the thing about travel, you have to be in the right frame of mind, with the right company.
Above all, we love travelling and experiencing new places, and this passion is something our followers pick up on and react to, whether we’re enjoying glamorous destinations like Monaco, the strip of coastline called the Côte d’Azur or French Riviera, a boutique hotel on Italy’s Lake Como (this place was literally next door to George Clooney’s mansion!) or the French lavender fields of Provence, or we are sharing secrets of the Kruger National Park with our European followers (and locals who haven’t visited it yet!).
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Travel Tales
One thing we’ve learnt over and over, and that we are now happy to be able to pass on to others, is that travelling is often nothing like what you see on Instagram.
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If you are really into Instagram, you will see the same photos being posted over and over again. There are photos specifically of Turkey, where you pay to sit at this beautiful view and then it looks like there are all these hot air balloons behind you – but it’s fake air balloons, and even fake food! It’s posing with things they put behind you.
When we travelled in Turkey we had a good laugh about that. And then you see those Bali pictures of the beautiful swing with the lights behind you. But did you know that people stand for two hours in a queue to get those photos, and it can cost between R2 000 and R5 000 to pose there?
From Halong Bay in Vietnam you always see these cute little boats that tourists can go sailing on. But what nobody tells you is that the rats eat you up in those boats! We were sleeping with our heads covered in plastic while the rats were running all over the boats. We can laugh about it now, but at the time we cursed that we fell for those photos!
Now we can at least share with our followers the real story about what these ‘famous photos’ are actually like – by all means, go and do it for yourself, that’s part of the joy of travelling, but at least we want to give people a more realistic idea of the experience they may be about to spend years of savings on.
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We are surprised and so grateful for this unexpected plot twist in our 50s. And we hope that we can share some of the great places we find – many of them doable even for travellers on a modest budget.
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Our number-one tip? Do travel the way you want. Don’t be beholden to anyone else’s idea of what makes a good time. We can’t remember a time when we ever woke up to catch a ‘perfect sunrise’. No, we are tired, we want to sleep! So get your suitcase or your backpack out and get out there – the world is waiting for you!”
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