Tractor woman on epic trip to the South Pole via Africa

A Dutch woman who is travelling across Africa by herself on a tractor has said she has been like a lone rescue service for broken-down vehicles along the way.

"I once towed a bus 140km through the desert to Sudan's capital," Manon Ossevoort said in Tanzania, 30 months and 20,000km into her epic trip.



Ms Ossevoort says her trip from Holland to the South Pole is "performance art".

Over the next year she will add another 15,000km and five more African countries to her epic mission.



Her account of trundling past the pyramids in Egypt, along the Nile River in Sudan, through the highlands of Ethiopia into the Maasai Mara in Kenya and then to Lake Victoria in Uganda, reads like the wanderings of an early explorer.

The tractor has not broken down yet. Its top speed is 20 km/h, but her average speed of around five km/h has been closer to the walking speed of those intrepid Victorians.



Next November Ms Ossevoort hopes to load the vehicle on to an ice-breaking boat at the Cape of Good Hope on the final leg of her epic journey to the South Pole.

Official website here.