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When Pablo González told his family and friends in Spain that he intended to walk from the Cape to Cairo, nobody believed him. That was in 2021, and with the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc across the world, that seemed an impossible feat.
“My family would go silent when I told them that I wanted to walk the whole length of Africa,” he says. “I was to start at Cape Town and South Africa had the deadly Omicron variant of the coronavirus. No one believed me.”
But González proved the naysayers wrong and for the last 600 days, he has walked through eight countries, namely; South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and, Kenya. There are three more to go; Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.
If he achieves his goal to reach Cairo, Egypt, he would be the first Spaniard and the youngest person in recorded history to have crossed the entire length of the continent on foot.
We are having some coffee rendezvous at a café at The Hub in Karen. González is dressed in a light white shirt and shorts but seems unperturbed by the biting July cold. Save for his hiking boots, there is little else that gives him away as the solo traveller walking through 11 African countries uninterrupted and unaided.
This is the story of González, the 29-year-old Spaniard who has been a professional dancer for half of his life. His major accomplishment was being among the cast for the only show in the world endorsed by the Michael Jackson family as a tribute to the late King of Pop.
At the height of the pandemic in 2021, González left everything to follow his other passion of travelling and immersing himself in a unique journey of discovery. Inspired by the great travellers of the 19th and 20th centuries, he wanted to reconnect with the place where it all began: Africa, "The Cradle of Humanity". And he wanted to show the wonders of traversing the continent using the most basic means of transport that exists: walking.
“I felt disconnected from society. I felt I did not belong anymore. It was a spiritual journey. I wanted to see what walking across Africa would feel like,” he says.
On November 6, 2021, González left his house in Madrid and flew to Cape Town with no more luggage than his passport and a 12kg backpack containing a tent, sleeping bag, two shirts, two pairs of socks, ‘enough underwear’, a pair of sandals, a pair of boots, two pens, basic hygienic kit, and some accessories such as water filters and a knife.
As the walk began in Cape Town, Africa’s ‘Mother City’, González began to feel a connection with the continent. Locals warned him of the dangers of such a walk in a country reported to have high crime levels. He was undeterred. "Africa is safe", he told himself, perhaps trusting in his ‘lucky charm’, a necklace gifted to him by a woman in South Africa.
But there were apprehensions too and fears within. These showed up in the form of Africa’s ferocious wild beasts.
González was attacked by a hippo while canoeing in a mokoro, a local canoe during sunrise in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. He was too close to a mating pair that never took his intrusion too kindly. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal. “I am happy I never made it to these statistics.”
In Botswana too, the idea of traversing the Kalahari, one of the world’s driest deserts crossed his mind. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of David Livingstone. The Scottish did it with a caravan by González wanted to do it solo, a move few have attempted. The local government would hear none of his pleas to be allowed to proceed.
But he trudged in the desert for 20 days despite a problem with his left foot following a bad infection. Here, he was completely isolated, only interacting with some small communities discovered after following cattle tracks to their villages and surviving on peanut butter, oats and some wild fruits. He got sick several times.
One night, the calmness was shattered when a pride of lions surrounded his tent, roaring the whole night, perhaps the scariest moment of his walk thus far. “I questioned myself at that moment. And I had to get up in the morning and walk with the lions nearby.”
Apart from animals, some government authorities thought he was a spy and got the military on alert. In Zimbabwe, he had to pretend to be a journalist and a close friend of the son of the president to avoid going to prison after being arrested and handcuffed by the police.
But there were triumphs too. González lived with the San, the famous indigenous tribes of Botswana inhabiting the Kalahari Desert. At Tsodilo Hills, still in Botswana, he visited the secret Python Cave, said to be the most ancient ritual site in the history of humankind, a magical place where the bushmen believe life started. Few people in the world have been there.
He slept alone inside the ancient and sacred ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the heart of the nation. “The last person that was inside here at night was a ‘fortune teller’ sent by the government in 2019 to pray for the country and covered in leopard skin.”
He climbed Ol Doinyo Lengai, the sacred mountain of the Maasai in Tanzania during the night, with the last full moon of the winter. And to cap it all, he was recently named the tourism ambassador of Zanzibar by the local Parliament.
González embarks on the final leg of his walk that will see him cross Ethiopia, Sudan and finally, Egypt. He will need the courage of the lions that traumatised him in Botswana to skirt through war-torn Sudan.
His journey of rebirth will terminate on the banks of the Nile. On the western side of the river, Egyptian kings built their tombs with the sunset signifying the end of life. Toward the east is the rising sun, and the birth of another day.
