By the time I managed to read this book it was quite dated. However, the experience of walking through Africa is honestly described with all the hardships of weather, disease and hostility.

What is most interesting and disturbing for me was her experience in Morocco with sexual harassment. The fact that this did not happen in all other Muslim countries in Africa is emphasized. This ehoes my own experience as a woman growing up in Muslim Arab countries. I feel safer among African men that I do among people sharing my culture. Africans have in general more respect for women than Arabs. ( )

There's been a lot of criticism about this book on the 'net--either that the author was a whiner and didn't want to take part in interviews, etc at the request of her sponsors or that she walked through Africa in an insulated bubble but about 200 pages into the book, I don't find that to be the case at all.

"...I was travelling through a tunnel, keeping reality beyond the firelight....I was walking to the beat of a different drum."

That was a passage that a previous reader had highlighted, maybe s/he heard the same controversy but I have to agree. It's something all travellers do as they travel--you can never feel and act exactly as the locals would because we're not locals.

Rather than a typical travel book, this is a day by day account of the issues at Ffyona Campbell faced as she travelled from South Africa to Morocco. Zaire was still Zaire at that point and a war zone, it was before the Rwandan genocide, yet trouble was brewing in Africa.

I know there were issues with her making the Guiness Book with her walk, but that doesn't mean her adventures were any less intriguing.

"No Coke, only Fanta." is a great phrase the author and her backup teams used to describe a situation that wasn't as they hoped, so so true :)

From the book's intro
"The possible is not what you can do but what you want to do." - Ian Fleming

So so true.
Review TBC when I finish the book.

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Journal entry 3 by SKingList from New York, New York USA on Friday, May 13, 2005

This book quickly progressed from 'good' to 'un-put-down-able'

Did Ffyona get a little whiny? Yes. Wouldn't you if you had malaria and amoebic dysentary and were faced with wars, closed borders, stoning, etc. in your quest for a goal? I sure as hell know I would.

She was younger when she did this walk then I am now and I find it really amazing what she was able to endure.

A great book and I am keen to read Feet of Clay about her trip across Australia. ( )