Description
After purchasing Pikkie Cottage Bed and Breakfast, owners Gideon and Ilse Scheepers, who have business interests in Qatar, asked relatives Tilla and Leon Nell to manage their establishment.
This came quite naturally, for Tilla worked as a tourist officer in Etosha National Park, Namibia, worked for nature conservation in Mpumalanga and was co-owner of a successful pub in Knysna and co-guide for the Nell’s tour guide business in the Garden Route and Little Karoo. She has travelled and worked widely across southern Africa, helped Leon with research while he was working on his travel books and her great love for botany led her to discovering a new fire lily species, Cyrtanthus aureolinus, on the northern slopes of the Swartberg in the Great Karoo in February 2005.
Leon worked as a tourist officer in Etosha National Park and as a nature conservator in Mpumalanga before moving to Knysna, where he owned a successful pub for seven years. In 2003 his first travel book, the highly acclaimed The Garden Route and Little Karoo (Book of the Month, Yorkshire Horticultural Society, UK, January 2004) was published, and he moved to De Rust to concentrate on more travel books. In 2005 he completed two visitor’s guides – one on Knysna and the other on Oudtshoorn, before completing The Great Karoo in 2008 (Book of the Year, Struik Random House Publishers) – all published by Struik and/or Struik Random House Publishers, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the southern hemisphere. In 2011 he wrote Die Oervlakte – Primordial Plains and has spent the last few years writing more than 300 articles for local papers and national magazines such as Country Life and Vrouekeur. He does all the photography for his coffee table books and magazines and is currently working on another coffee table book about the West Coast.
Beide is ten volle tweetalig.
