Bridget Thackwray and Topher Richwhite get up close and personal with an African elephant. Photo / Supplied.
Bridget Thackwray and Topher Richwhite get up close and personal with an African elephant. Photo / Supplied.
Intrepid travellers Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray have reached day 365 of their spectacular journey the length and width of the world.
Since Spy revealed details of the incredible trip, the pair have captured global headlines, won a legion of famous social media followers, formed a partnership with National Geographic, and — most recently — partnered with the World Wildlife Fund during the African leg of Expedition Earth.
Richwhite said from the beginning, in North America, they became aware of the stress the expanding human population was having on the natural world.
"A large focus of the expedition is to showcase the planet's overpopulation, and how preserving and restoring these natural habitats is so important," he says.
Recently the pair worked with the Imire Rhino and Wildlife Conservation in Zimbabwe. The conservation project is run by a family who were given seven rhino to care for by the Government when poachers almost claimed the entire population.
"They managed to breed these rhino and release them into the wild," says Thackwray. "All the released rhino were poached. And only a few years ago poachers broke into their facility overnight and slaughtered all their rhino at their centre.
Bridget Thackwray and Topher Richwhite have spent the past year travelling the world. Photo / Instagram @expeditionearth.live.
"They've kept going, and are beginning to release rhino back into the wild once again. An amazing story of persistence and selflessness."
"During our visit there we were invited out with their anti-poaching unit. Armed guards and a tracker dog," she adds.
Last week the pair were working with Game Rangers International in Zambia.
"They had 15 baby elephants that lost their parents from the elephant poaching trade," Thackwray says. "Every 15 minutes an elephant is poached in Africa for ivory."
Expedition Earth on Instagram now has almost 200,000 followers.
The next WWF project they will be involved in will be in Uganda with gorillas and the next National Geographic project will be in Tanzania with lions.
The couple still have their faithful jeep Gunther for their travels. They are currently driving through the cyclone zone in Mozambique.
This year they will cover Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and finish on the Russian border.
Next year they will work their way down though Asia to New Zealand, finishing the expedition in Auckland in December 2020.
