Following the lead of ambitious travelers

A recent entry in the GAP Adventures forum tips us off to a few adventurous souls who have taken up some unusual travel itineraries.

One is a group of Kiwis who retraced Marco Polo’s route across Eurasia on motorcycle a few years ago. Their Venice, Italy to Xanadu, China trip took a small fraction of Polo's travel time—just 3 months.

If their latest trip went off as anticipated, they must've just returned from a trip to Antarctica, where they would not only enjoy more biking, but also hiking, kayaking, and scuba.

The other person mentioned in the forum is Paula Constant, an Aussie who walked over 12000km (7456 miles) through 8 countries (England, France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali and Niger) And she would’ve gone even farther if it hadn’t been for a civil war in Niger. Check her website again in October. That’s when she’s planning on picking up where she left off—crossing the rest of her Sahara, and eventually making her way south to Cape Town, South Africa. But in the meantime, her latest excitement is her book, “Slow Journey South.” It’s only out in bookstores in Australia, but it can also be bought online through Gleebooks.com.

Here's an inspiring excerpt from her book:

"I think back to the person who sat on a sand dune and dreamed of walking through Africa, and I think of how truly powerful our dreams are, think that it is our dreams which tell us who we really are and what is important for us, that they are our identity, our reality, our comfort in the dark night and our defence against the false paths strewn in front of us by a society which does not honour their wisdom. I think of how very close I came on so many occasions to deserting my dreams because they seemed too hard, or because people told me they were crazy. And then I think that this walk is the most important thing I have ever done, that I have learned more about myself and the world around me in this last year than I did in the thirty years before it, and I take a deep breath and throw back my head and look at the stars blazing with otherworldly power far above me in the clear crystal desert night and I feel the rip tide within surge and ebb once more and I think to myself:

There is nothing I cannot do."