Plennie L. Wingo (January 24, 1895 – October 2, 1993) walked backwards from Santa Monica, California, to Istanbul, Turkey (about 13,000 km/8,000 miles) from April 15, 1931 to October 24, 1932 at the age of 36. He documented his voyage in the book Around the world backwards.
 
To do so, he wore periscopic eyeglasses, fastened over his ears like regular spectacles, which enabled him to see where he was walking. He walked an average of about 20 miles per day.
 
8. The man who walked 1,830 miles on stilts

Tété-Michel Kpomassie was born in 1941, in Togo. When he was a young man, he was in the jungle when he was surprised by a python, and fell to the ground. His father believed that his resulting illness could only be cured by consulting the priestess of the python cult, deep in the forest, and so he was taken, through one long night, into the heart of the snake-infested cult. The cure worked, but the priestess required a payment. Kpomassie must become initiated into the snake cult and live for the next seven years in the jungle, among the snakes.
 
It was at this time, recovering from his illness and waiting to be taken back to the jungle, that Kpomassie found a children's book about Greenland. Not only did this strange country have no snakes, but it had no trees in which they might hide. He fell immediately in love with the country and ran away from home, with the sole idea of somehow reaching Greenland.
 
For the next twelve years he traveled, refusing to stay in one place more than six months, and worked his way through the countries of West Africa, into Europe, and finally, in the mid-1960s, found a boat to Greenland. All the while, he taught himself languages through correspondence courses and made an endless number of friends through his skills as a story-teller and natural charm. The story of his adventures in Greenland can be found in his book, published in France in 1977, An African in Greenland.
 
10. The man who went on a cross country walk over the US to lose weight



Steve Vaught undertook an incredible challenge beginning in 2005 - to walk across the US. He began the 3,000-mile trek from his Oceanside, Calif. home to Manhattan on April 10, 2005, when he weighed 410 pounds and was suffering severe depression after accidentally killing two pedestrians while driving 15 years ago.
 
Quite apart from attracting his fair share of media attention, he managed to shed over 100 lb in the process. But Vaught's journey was not without controversy. Questions were raised by both the media and fans as to whether Vaught caught rides and did not in fact walk every mile. Vaught was also still morbidly obese upon completion of his journey. In his defense he claims "You can't cheat. There is no possible way to cheat. It was my journey (…) I didn't care about where I was at and where I was going. I don't care if it was 2,800 or 1,500 miles. . . . It's about where your head is."