Extreme tourists set off to walk through Africa

Breitbart.com 08/12/2010 15:55

From Cape Town to Khartoum, extreme tourists Guillaume and Enora have trekked off the beaten track on foot, surviving on less than two dollars (1.5 euros) a day on a journey that will take them three years to complete.

Unlike compatriots who have crossed the African continent by car in the Dakar rally, or by motorbike or bicycle raising money for a cause, these French tourists decided to trek through jungles and deserts in a professed bid to better understand humanity.

"In the beginning we walked for the adventure, and then we tried to understand Africans' strange attitude towards us," said Guillaume Combot, 31, a former French parachutist who studied psychology in Canada and had once tried to become a monk at the Saint-Benoit-du-Lac in Quebec.

"We took off without really knowing why. I was a little lost and I knew that I just wanted to walk.

"The first stage was to try and understand Africa, the second stage was more broad, to try and understand humanity," Combot told AFP while in Khartoum.

He said people didn't understand the motivation behind walking across the continent, particularly outside the cities and large towns.

"The question to us was always 'why are you acting like you are poor, why are you pretending to be suffering?,'" he said, a little dispirited.

Together with his friend Enora Nedelec, 21, the pair left France for Cape Town in February 2009 with 3,000 Euros (nearly 4,000 dollars) in their pockets with the aim of walking back to Paris-- an adventure that should take him three years, while she plans to end her journey in Jerusalem a little earlier.