February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And along the way throw in some mountains and jungles for good measure.
The South African-born resident of Dublin has just completed a mammoth 10,000-mile horseback ride from Argentina to New Jersey.
The last leg of the journey will take Marianne and her two faithful horses into Manhattan for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Given what she has just completed, it’s a fair bet to say that St. Patrick and a few other heavenly beings were watching over a woman who marked two birthdays in some of the wildest places left on earth.
There was good reason for them to do so. Du Toit was no idle adventurer.
The reasoning behind Du Toit’s “TATA Challenge” — TATA standing for “Travels Across The Americas” — is to raise funds to open a therapeutic equestrian center in Ireland for mentally and physically challenged children.
Despite its international reputation for horse breeding and equestrian activities in general, Ireland does not have such a facility.
Du Toit was raised on a farm in South Africa but is now an Irish citizen. She arrived in Ireland in the mid-1990s on a holiday that included a trip to Dingle in County Kerry to see its famed resident Dolphin, Fungi.
A holiday turned into a home and Du Toit settled in Dublin.
With her family’s farming background, she has been long convinced of the soothing nature of humankind’s relationship with the horse. So she decided that the time had come for just such a center in Ireland. But first the adventure.
“I wanted to undertake an adventure, to see the world in a different way. But I also wanted to use my travels for the benefit of others,” Du Toit, who is 34, said from New Jersey this week in advance of her March 15 arrival in Manhattan.
Du Toit has been on the road, the trail and sometimes tracks that don’t fit either definition, for the last 21 months. She set out from just outside Buenos Aires on June 15, 2002. It was Du Toit’s simple intention to ride and walk a horse up through the Americas and finish with a first time visit to the Big Apple.
It was a mind-boggling idea as far as some of her family and friends were concerned. But Du Toit was convinced that she could do it, especially after reading a book about a Swiss explorer, Aim