CHARITY CYCLE:FOUR STUDENTS who became friends at Trinity College Dublin plan to raise money for Kenyan street children by cycling 25,000km (16,000 miles) from Alaska to Argentina this summer.
Brian McDermott, Alan Gray, Ben Cunningham and Kevin Hillier, who begin their trip in June, aim to average 130km (80 miles) a day, with one rest stop every six days.
Their trip will follow a route from Prudhoe Bay, in the Arctic Circle, through North, Central and South America to Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego. It is expected to take them between eight and nine months. They will be travelling though 14 countries, passing through the blisteringly hot Baja California peninsula, in northern Mexico, and the Atacama Desert, in western Chile, which is the driest place on earth.
"We will be forced to negotiate four of the earth's largest and highest mountain ranges over the two continents, and travel through countries that are ranked among the most dangerous in the world," says Cunningham, a fouth-year history student.
They aim to raise €200,000 for the charity Aidlink, a Dublin-based non-denominationaldevelopment organisation. The money will be used for projects in Kenya that deal with the education and care of street children in Nairobi, Lodwar and Kisumu.
Official estimates put the number of street children in Nairobi at between 50,000 and 60,000.
There's an opportunity for people to cycle one of the trip's 14 stages if they can raise €2,000.
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