Jenya Zhivaleva

Evgenia (Jenya) Zhivaleva is a Co-Founder of Unravel Surf Travel, a tour operator established in 2010, based in Mossel Bay, South Africa, and specialising in surf trips for the Russian / Eastern European market. Jenya was born in the Ukrainian part of the former Soviet Union (USSR) and moved to South Africa in 2009 after meeting her husband (Hermann Vivier) while studying at the University of Amsterdam. She was one of the first operators to sell South Africa as a destination in the Russian tourism market. When the first Russian - Ukrainian conflict broke out in 2014 international sanction made it difficult (and in some cases impossible) to receive payments from clients wanting to book trips to South Africa with Unravel Surf Travel. As a work-around to these sanctions she started accepting Bitcoin payments in early 2015. Today, and particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Unravel Surf Travel is one of the first tour operators in South Africa accepting the vast majority of its clients' payments in Bitcoin.