I’m Meruschka a.k.a Mzansigirl – African travel activist, experience seeker, and tourism thinker. I’m a passionate South African and obsessed with sharing everything awesome about my country and continent particularly anything related to travel or culture.
I think the travel bug bit when I was a kid, where I discovered South Africa through countless road trips with my family. My first independent African travel experience was backpacking from Joburg to Malawi via Mozambique in 2003, after which I was hooked! I chose @Mzansigirl as my Twitter handle during the 2010 World Cup. Micro-blogging with Twitter allowed me to share my love for Africa with the world. I recently founded the #Afritravel hashtag on Twitter to help curate great African travel related content.
A few thousand Africa-positive tweets later some travel tweeps suggested I blog, and the rest is history. I started blogging in July 2012, 16 months later I resigned from my day job to focus on sharing the African travel love. I am currently pursuing a freelance travel writing and blogging, as well as digital media consulting and training for small businesses. I’m passionate about creating good content and assisting small businesses in harnessing the power of digital media.
I’m an Afrophile at heart – I love African travel, music and festivals. I love the energy of African cities, her amazing people, the sounds of the bush, the fabulous sunsets, diverse cultures and beauty everywhere. I’ve spent 8 years working in the tourism sector in all aspects from running a backpacker hostel, to working for South Africa’s only tourism NGO and eventually working in tourism policy in national government. Although my work allowed me to visit African countries, I didn’t get as much time for the kind travel that I wanted to do.
Through my local wanderings I’ve discovered some awesome things to do, see and experience in and around Mzansi. I will always be a Durban girl, but I do love the urban vibe and creative spirit of Jozi. I love exploring South Africa, as there is so much diversity here, Mzansi never ceases to amaze me. Step just across our borders there is so much in amazing Africa to be explored, so many stories to be told.
From a tourism industry perspective, I’m particularly interested in responsible tourism, social media in tourism & tourism marketing and development. Be ready to share the Mzansi love with me!
Please note that all opinions expressed in this blog are my own. Though some of my travels are sponsored these are declared and I maintain full editorial control over the content published on this site.
If you would like to contact me for events, freelance writing, speaking engagements, media trips and the like, you can do so here.