The duo will travel to 25 countries covering 25,000 km in 65 days

Gautom Menon and Paul George from the Coimbatore-based Wild Tiger Foundation (WTF) embarked on ‘The Roar Trip’, a cross-continental drive covering 25 countries to create awareness on tiger conservation, from Coimbatore on Monday.

During the trip, the two men will cover around 25,000 km in 65 days to reach Cannes in France, the final destination.

Coimbatore-based entrepreneur Meenakshi Aravind, who was part of a three-member all women team which completed a 28,600 km road trip from Coimbatore to London last year to commemorate 70 years of India’s Independence, officially flagged off the Roar Trip at CMS College of Science and Commerce on Monday. The trip was informally started from Parambikulam Tiger Reserve in Kerala on Sunday.

Marking the start of the road trip which coincided with the International Tiger Day, 1,500 students from the college formed themselves as human chains to form ‘WTF 4000’ indicating the estimated number of live wild tigers on earth, said organisers.

Other than India, the road trip will cover Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy and France.

M. P. Gopalakrishnan, chairman of CMS Educational and Charitable Trust, T. R. Ashok, managing trustee of the trust, C. K. Venkatesan, principal of CMS College of Science and Commerce, Suprej, co- founder of WTF, Timothy Vedanayagam, CEO of Advantech Data Link Solutions and S. Sandhya Menon, CEO of CMS Group of Institutions spoke at the event.