Meet the team

Ilze Fourie
Africa Specialist
With a Travel & Tourism degree, plus over ten years experience in the Travel Industry, Ilze is not only passionate about travel but well qualified too. Her travels have taken her from Europe to Taiwan, and extensively through her native South Africa. Namibia is a favourite destination, and her knowledge of Southern Africa is the envy of the company.

“I love designing programmes for clients as I can express my creativity, offering as many of the highlights as possible whilst taking care not to rush the trip. No challenge is too big!”

Ilze deals with the majority of bookings, designing the programmes and liaising with the suppliers. She also looks after our Southern Africa product, ensuring that our itineraries are continuously fresh and up to date.

She lives at home with fiancé Craig and their two dogs.

Lucy Scott
Marketing
Lucy travelled on the very first Face Africa trip to Uganda and Rwanda in February 2005. She has, in her time, travelled around the globe from West to East, bush-whacked through Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, conducted a research project into female micro-enterprise on the edge of Lake Victoria and is a frequent visitor to Cape Town and South Africa. Now married and a mother, she lends the benefit of her marketing experience to us on a part-time basis. With a professional background at Exxon-Mobil and AXA, Lucy manages our marketing to company intranets and one-off events in the UK.

Currently on sabbatical with husband Nick and daughter Annabel travelling in Southern Africa, Lucy will be returning to the UK in 2010 to settle on the family farm in Lincolnshire.

Derek Bytheway
Business Advisor
Derek has provided continued and indispensable advice and support to Face Africa from Day One. A latter-day African adventurer, in the last seven years he has travelled to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. Not a bad effort really! Despite being a guinea-pig for new Face Africa tours, his previous life involved positions as Managing Director of Crown Wallcoverings, Businessland and Metro Products. Following this wealth of business experience, Derek became Chairman of the Surrey division of the Prince’s Youth Business Trust.

Chairman of Pirbright Cricket Club and a member at The Oval, whenever England are playing cricket in South Africa, you can bet Derek is in his seat at Newlands…

Tina Bytheway
UK Office Manager
Together with Derek, Tina has travelled extensively in Africa and worldwide.  Having run her own PR business for 20 years, Tina is supremely over-qualified to do the job that she does so admirably.  Tina runs the UK office and ensures that all your paperwork and payments are processed quickly and efficiently.  She is also our single best marketing agent, and lends the benefit of her travel experiences to many others who soon end up as Face Africa clients!  That’s why we’re so pleased to see her return to South Africa & Swaziland for an extended stay over the summer of 2009-2010.

Tim Ellis
Founder & Director
Travel flows through Tim's veins. It began with a year backpacking on a round-the-world ticket after leaving school, and continued through University summers with trips to Central America and Europe. Having gained a degree, he set off with a close friend to India where they bought a pair of Royal Enfield motorcycles and rode them back to the UK via the Karakoram in Pakistan, the deserts of Iran, the mountains of Eastern Turkey and the Mediterranean coastline.

A chance trip to Cape Town in 1999 began the connection to Africa. Recognising the stirring of a passion, Tim got a job with leading UK adventure company Dragoman as a Tour Leader. Leading groups of travellers through sub-Saharan Africa was to see the joy of travel through fresh eyes: To share a carton of beer in a shebeen in rural Malawi; to squat in a Maasai hut in Tanzania and consider the collision of a money-free pastoral society with capitalist ‘civilisation’; to share in the exhausted pleasure of building a pre-school to give hope to and inspire tomorrow’s generations in a remote Basotho community. These were but small elements of trips, yet reflected in the eyes of the participants – these were the real highlights.

His original concept with Face Africa was to provide a combination of guide-led travel and engagement with sustainable community development. To service a market that wanted to take an extended trip to Africa which would include visits to the numerous and fascinating natural and wildlife highlights, as well as the opportunity to ‘give back’ something sustainable to the local communities. To affirm the link between interaction, participation and fun.

This concept has now matured and the tours that Face Africa offers today are a response to requests from our travellers for Fairly Traded holidays, tours and safaris. Tim also currently spearheads the Face Africa Community and School Linking Programme, which links UK communities and especially schools into our local community partners here in Africa – setting up links and running expeditions from the UK. Keep an eye out for more info as this new development grows!

Tim is based in Cape Town where he lives with Marileze and his boss Oscar (see below). Despite spending more and more time at his desk, he still manages to lead several trips, which satisfies the desire for time spent on the road…

Oscar
Cape Town Office Supervisor
Always ready with an affectionate nuzzle or a warning grunt, Oscar effectively rules Tim and Marileze’s lives and patrols the Face Africa office. With aspirations to take over the business in the future (see left), Oscar currently spends his days lazing in the Cape sunshine and chasing birds on the Sea Point promenade at lunchtime. His owners aren’t convinced that this will prepare him properly for the takeover but, gnawing on a juicy bone, he disagrees…