A wedding reception held at the side of the Kennet and Avon Canal on Saturday was a blend of Bollywood and the Wild West with the couple wearing traditional Indian costume but spending their honeymoon night in a Red Indian Tepee.

It was the way that Doug Stanley and his mystic bride Suzanne Gaia planned their big day, a case of the East meeting the Wild West.

The couple, who had both been married before, had a civil wedding at Marlborough Town Hall wearing their Indian costumes with the bride in a traditional lengha Indian skirt with a sari top and the bridegroom wearing a three-quarter length Indian sherwani jacket over baggy cream silk trousers, both with Indian shoes.

Then they moved their nuptials down to Honeystreet where they live in a canalside cottage to hold the reception around a Native American tepee.

They also spent their first night as man and wife inside the wigwam at the Barge inn where their reception was held in a marquee.

It was the way that the couple wanted their wedding to be, a mixture of the cultures of the Indian sub continent and those of the American Red Indians which, said the bride may be geographically continents apart but very close in their spirituality.

Although the new Mrs Stanley, 50, is a chartered accountant by training works as a healer spending part of each winter in India learning different therapies to help in her work.

“I spend nearly half my life in India every winter and I look upon it as my second home,” she said.

Mr Stanley, 51, who is currently a laundry operative, spent three and a half weeks in India with his bride-to-be last winter and said he, too, had been fascinated by the culture.

The pair have known each other for a long time and been friends for seven years, said Mrs Stanley, and share a cottage home at Honeystreet by the canal.

She said: “I have always loved tepees and wanted one and I jumped at the chance of being able to start our honeymoon in one.

They had hoped that a good friend of theirs from India, the Reiki healing master Rittu Sood, would be at the wedding on Saturday but there were delays in getting her a visa and the wedding party had to go ahead without her but with a message of goodwill instead from the British Consul in Delhi who telephoned to explain why her arrival had been postponed.

Mrs Stanley said her Indian mentor was now planning to visit her at Honeystreet in two weeks time.