He’s not actually going along (as fas as I know), but he has built a new Web site to help Paula Constant recount her quest to cross the Sahara Desert on foot.

Paula had to put her trek on hiatus late last spring, when she ran out of cash. She returned to the UK to raise money and chase down sponsors and has acquired two: Dove, the soap people, and Birkenstock, the sandal people. Now she’s ready to get back on the trail — camdels in tow — and hike to Egypt from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast (route here).

Outcomes like this are one of the genuine rewards of blogging. I write about hiking, thru-hiker Cyberhobo finds my site and takes an interest in it; I take an interest in another site and post links; Cyberhobo, sharing similar interests, starts reading that site (or this could be the other way around — he may have posted the link that got me interested in Constanttrek); it doesn’t occur to me to help the owner of this site build a better one but it does occur to Cyberhobo. I’m in California, he’s in Colorado, she’s in the Sahara Desert — and these little contrivances called blogs helped bring us all together.

Is that cool or what?

(By the way, Constant’s new blog is here. )