Dubai: An Austrian man is on a sacred mission to keep a promise he made to his sister battling cancer.
A qualified civil engineer Thair Abud (49), who dumped a €10,000 plus (Dh42,000) job as general manager of an Austrian MNC and a BMW 730i before setting out on the sacred journey, is expected to complete over 8000km route from Austria to Makkah in April the next month, a media report said.
Thair Abud started walking from his residence in Graz, Austria on July 25 last year in a pair of jeans and a tee. He reached Dubai in February last week - his fourth stop, according to Gulf News.
After a short break in Dubai, he set out on his journey's last leg – a roughly 2,000km road trip via Salalah in Oman to Madinah, and eventually to Makkah, the final destination.
While talking to Gulf News, Abud, son of an Iraqi father and a German mother, recalled how it all began last summer.
"It was", he remembers, "Following a 'short' 2,500km trip on foot from Austria to Santigo de Compostela in Spain the previous year after his sister, Zaussen, now 50, was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer."
"When I arrived back home from Spain, she told me that when her pain was unbearable, she found comfort by following and reading up more about my trail. It is then I made an offering that if she turns healthy again, I will walk all the way from Graz to Makkah.
Walking with a rucksack on his back, a Panama hat for shade and two Nordic sticks for support, Abud, son of an Iraqi father and a German mother, has since walked through Zagreb (Croatia), Nikšic and Podgorica (Montenegro), Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Skopje (Macedonia), Shkodër (Albania), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Istanbul, Samsun and Trabzon (Turkey) before eventually reaching Tehran and then Isfahan in Iran en route to the UAE.
"The day I reach Makkah, it will be the culmination of a word I gave to my sister after she was detected with cancer. Today she has, after several rounds of chemotherapy, beaten the killer disease and is undergoing her breast reconstruction therapy," explained the father of three who speaks Italian and Spanish besides fluent Arabic, German and English.
Abud will be covering 8,150km across 12 countries in about 270 days walking 30km on an average per day.
"The journey has changed my perception about life and the world around me. It has also made me physically resilient," says Abud.
In a similar patter, Senad Hadzic, had in 2012 walked from Bosnia to Makkah on foot to perform haj. Senad had covered some 5,700 km in 314 days of walking through Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and Jordan to Makkah, with a backpack weighing 20 kg.
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