It's been a long time coming. Adventure travel is one of the biggest and most popular sorts of travel and so Travel Weekly - which is what Travel & Food will be called from next Sunday - decided to appoint its own outdoor travel team.

Sunday Times staffers Claire Keeton and Marianne Schwankhart will handle the writing and photography respectively as they roam around Africa on assignment for Sunday Times Travel Weekly. It's a dream job any way you look at it.

Both women are old hands at the paper as well as experienced and well-travelled reporters. An inveterate traveller, Claire has been to 49 countries. She is a rock climber, mountain biker, whitewater rafter and kayaker, surfer, scuba diver and hiker who has done many of this country's great trails. She's also a kickboxer, has a purple belt in karate and can play piano and guitar. When not out in the field, she is the Sunday Times' health reporter as well as a writer on the Lifestyle section.

Marianne is one of the country's best news photographers whose byline has often appeared from some the world's less happy places. To call her a dedicated climber and mountaineer would be underplaying her talents: right now, she is involved in an epic quest to climb the highest mountain on each continent and then paraglide from the summit. So far she's knocked off two of the summits - Aconcagua in Argentina and Elbrus in Russia, and will shortly leave for Tanzania to tackle Mount Kilimanjaro.

Marianne's climbing resumé is littered with impressive feats, including all three peaks of the Torres del Paine in Chile - each of which is about 1km of vertical rock - as well as being the only woman thus far to have climbed the Central Torres del Paine's east face. Another expedition took her to climb the Trango Tower in Pakistan, a kilometre-high rock spire at 6000m above sea level. "I do enjoy some normal activities like cooking and playing with my low- maintenance cat," she says.

The Girls Gone Wild will be exploring and writing about the continent's best adventure travel destinations. There will be stories on canoe safaris on the Zambezi River, trekking to see the gorillas in Rwanda, horse safaris on the Wild Coast - adventures that are open to anyone with a bit of wanderlust in their hearts.

They will also answer all your questions, from what kind of boots to buy for your first hike to how to dig a 4x4 out of sand.

So, see you next week, then.