Sat, August 5 2006

Martin Strel, who is the first person to swim the lengths of the Danube (2000), the Mississippi (2002) and the Yangtze (2004) rivers, was recently in Minnesota, USA, training for his next project, the Amazon.

In February 2007, he will swim the Amazon river starting close to its source in Peru, and finish where the river spills out of the Amazon Basin into the Atlantic Ocean, at Belem, Brazil, a total of 3,393 miles. This is a distance longer than the width of the Atlantic Ocean. The distance covered will be a new Guinness Book distance record. More about the project at: www.amazonswim.com.

While staying in St.Paul, Minnesota, Martin again met with his friend Will Steger, the great polar explorer. Steger led the first dogsled expedition to the North Pole without re-supply (1986), the 1,600-mile south-north traverse of Greenland (the longest unsupported dogsled expedition in history in 1988), the first dogsled traverse of Antarctica (the historic seven month, 3,471-mile International Trans-Antarctica Expedition in 1989-90), and the first and only dogsled traverse of the Arctic Ocean from Russia to Ellesmere Island, Canada (1995).

Both Will Steger and Martin Strel are going to do their next projects in about the same time period next year.

Martin will start swimming the Amazon on Feb 1. Will is to embark on Feb 15, on an expedition called Global Warming 101, a 1400-mile four-month-long dogsled trek, where he’ll crisscross the Canadian Arctic’s Baffin Island. The goal of his expedition is to study on sites in the Arctic the impact of rising global temperatures.

Martin and Steger also exchanged the books about their previous achievements.

More about Will Steger and Global Warming 101 at: www.willsteger.com and www.globalwarming101.com.