Great Escapes: Photographer Skye Parrott’s Dreamy Shoot And Journey Through South Africa

"I went to South Africa in March for a ten-day shoot. My assistant, Edon, my brother Hank (also my digi-tech), my boyfriend, Jeremy, and his four-year-old son, Stig, came, too. The flight from New York is 22 hours via Amsterdam, and the shoot was in a studio in Cape Town. For some reason, Cape Town felt like California to me. After the job wrapped, we drove down the coast of False Bay to Simon's Town, where we rented a house overlooking Boulders Beach on the Indian Ocean. There are wild penguins living there, and it's one of the only beaches in the area where you can safely swim because the boulders protect it from the Great White Sharks. The penguins are called 'jackass penguins' because they make a braying sound like a donkey. The house we rented was a tower up on a hill, and the first two nights we couldn't sleep because the wind was so strong and the penguins were so loud. The wind eventually died down and the beach was beautiful. One rainy day, we drove down the rest of the coast to see the Cape of Good Hope. We saw wild baboons and some kind of antelope...beautiful. And we bought Stig a slingshot and taught him how to shoot rocks off the lighthouse at the tip of Africa. We were gone for almost the whole month...definitely not your typical work vacation."