Two student journalists won an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa after taking their surfboards and a state-of-the-art mobile phone into a Cardiff river.

Andy Sloan, (28), of Horsham, West Sussex, and Chris Cousens, (22), of St Davids, Pembrokeshire, dived into the freezing waters of the River Taff in Cardiff with a new mobile phone strapped to their boards to win a weekend of sunshine in South Africa – all in the name of mobile journalism.

The pair are on a Post Graduate Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at Cardiff Journalism School. It teamed up with Nokia to test out the latest mobile offering, the N95, to explore the possibilities for mobile journalism.

The collaboration was part of Cardiff’s expanding online journalism module and Nokia’s “Trends Lab” experiments.

As an incentive to the trainees Nokia ran a competition with the winners being flown out to South Africa to make a film on Nokia’s first Trends Lab experiment in Africa.

Both avid surfers, Andy and Chris wrapped Nokia’s latest mobile in freezer bags and filmed their adventures surfing down Cardiff’s River Taff in search of an imaginary surf spot, Cardiff Reef. Their film was chosen by Nokia and four days later they were on a plane to Cape Town.

See their film here.

Andy said: “I was absolutely delighted. You can’t really argue against a long weekend in Cape Town in December. We only had a few days to get everything ready and it was all a bit of a whirlwind, but what an experience.

“Nokia started out making wellies and the company was named after a river so we decided to splash around in some water to win the prize. It was great fun and a little bit out of the ordinary so I think that’s what sealed it for us.

“We got a different perspective on Cardiff thanks to the size of the phones and by taking a bit of a risk with them.”

Chris said: “Everything about the trip was fantastic.

“Cape Town is a breath-taking place, the sun is shining, the locals are friendly and the scenery is stunning. We only had a short trip, but we saw so much; we even made time to go surfing.”

Online journalism lecturer at Cardiff, Matthew Yeomans, said it was the first time the department had worked with Nokia and was designed to show how online stories can easily contain more multi-media elements due to the quality of film and sound that can be captured on the latest mobiles.

He said: “The idea was to create a piece of mobile journalism that would tell a story of film, design or music in Cardiff.

“The winners were sent to South Africa for the weekend, which was a great coup for the journalism school and for the trainees.”