On Sunday the 1st of June 2008 I braved a very chilly early morning start to head down to the Jo’burg Zoo to take part with around 200 or so TNT staff, family and friends to “Walk the World”
Walk the World is an annual event that TNT hosts to raise funds and awareness for the World Food Program (the UN’s WFP) thousands of people all around the world take part in this event that is held around the globe on the same day.
I think this sums up what Walk the World is all about – source: Moving the World website.
Walk the World 2008: A great success!
Thousands of children who know what it feels like to be hungry took to the streets yesterday, together with TNT- and Unilever-employees, their families and friends. From Indonesia to Guatemala, more than 250,000 people in 70 countries participated in End Hunger: Walk the World. Across 24 time zones and in more than 250 locations, initial reports say the global walk raised more than $500,000; enough to feed 2 million children for one day through WFP's school feeding programme. We expect this number to increase significantly in the weeks to come. "Walk the World is the event to raise awareness for all the children who suffer from hunger every day," said Peter Bakker, CEO of TNT. "At TNT we believe that hunger is not acceptable in today's world. I am proud that so many employees, their families and friends on all continents of the world have actively taken part in this Walk to show their solidarity and to raise funds to give these children the daily meal they deserve."
Funds raised by TNT South Africa will be channelled though to the South African Food Bank this year as WFP do not host any feeding programs here in South Africa as this is handled by the SA Food Bank. WFP do however support the SA Food Bank.
So I arrived at Jo’burg Zoo a place I had been to many, many times when I was a lot younger. I have a vivid memory of the polar bears that were kept at the zoo when I was younger. I was very pleasantly surprised to see they still had the polar bears in a much nicer enclosure. Jo’burg Zoo is the only Zoo in Africa to have polar bears. I also saw the original enclosure and I was very sad to see how small it was. Things have defiantly progressed for the Jo’burg Zoo.
I am not sure if one can realistically base how well a city is doing on how well maintained it zoo is. I was surprised to learn that the zoo still existed let alone see how well maintained it was and the range of animals in it. It could be rated as world classed. But to me it does give me some hope that Johannesburg as a city is heading in the right direction. It has fantastic restaurants, top music acts like James Blunt and Counting Crows are performing in Johannesburg (or have quite recently) so it must be doing something right.
Back to the walk!
So some 200 people arrived to take part in Walk the World Jo’burg. There was also an event in Swaziland and one down in Richards Bay ( home of the SA Food Bank) The weather was fantastic, a bit cold to start with, clear skies and well just a really nice day to go for a walk around the zoo. To give you an idea of the size of the zoo the walk was around 5km in length and it was all within the grounds of the Zoo. This made it a really ideal location to host this walk. Not only did it offer a save place to walk but it was an interesting place to walk too.
I am not sure how much money TNT SA raided for the SA Food bank but as soon as I have an update I will let you all know.
I took loads of photos during the walk (121 exactly) The pix can be found here.
Here are some links to the YouTube clips I have posted from the Walk the World event.
Part 1 can be found here
Part 2 can be found here
As some of you will know I am a bit of a gadget nut head. I love my toys and I am proud to call my self an anorak. I have always enjoyed photography and recently splashed out on a digital SLR. I got my self a Canon EOS 400D awesome bit of kit. While I was reading up on tutorials I came across an interesting article called GEO-Tagging. Basically it’s the syncing up of the date and time stamp of your photos to a GPS track log. This info gets attached to a meta tag embedded in the photo. So this means you can now see the lat and long of a photo you have GEO-Tagged. Flickr reads this info and plots it on a map. Cool stuff hey.
Click here to see the map of where my photos were taken on Flickr.
You can also see the data log file in google earth here. I am yet to work out how to get the photos to appear in this file online. It works fine on my laptop as the file knows where the photos are (they are on my laptop!) so that’s a bit of a project for me to work out.
The GPS Data Logger can be used for other things besides the photo tags – you can upload the file into google earth and see where you have been. The data logger I am using is a Sony GPS-CS1 with Jet Photo Studio. (click the links to find out more about these items)
Attached here is my route to the Zoo – you can see I got a bit lost! The squiggles on the left of the log is the zoo. (You do need Google Earth to view the track logs click here to down load it)
So I got to have a good walk with some fantastic people take some fab photos with my new camera and play with some new toys too. Great day out
To find out more about Walk the World please click here.
To find out more about the partnership between TNT and WFP please click here.
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