‘Adventure’ is a relative term. For some it can be the day you lock yourself out of your car, negotiated the public transport system in Bangkok, or simply got off course on an organized tour. For others, it’s setting out alone on an uncharted path with nothing but vision, pluck and determination to achieve the so-called “impossible.” And doing it so often it becomes an unproblematic habit and lifelong feature of one’s way of life.
Notable among these bold adventurers have been a number of women, all who made their mark as writers as well.
In the early 20th century, Freya Stark’s treks into the Valley of the Assassins in western Iran and along the Frankincense Trail in Arabia stunned the world with their sheer novelty and bravura.
Having been infatuated with One Thousand and One Nights as a child, and introduced to Arabic while at university, Stark writes of the thrill of finding oneself engulfed in the sounds and textures of an entirely different world: “to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
Her wanderlust unquenched, she was leading expeditions into remote corners of Afghanistan well into her seventies.
Having set the bar for subsequent explorers, Stark’s experiences inspired two women – Dervla Murphy and Bettina Selby – to ‘tour’ the mountains and high deserts of Western Asia by bicycle.
Setting forth from Ireland and England respectively in the 1960s, they were to face every danger and deprivation that might beset the self-propelled female traveller: helmet-crushing rain storms, over-zealous innkeepers, merciless cold, unscrupulous police officers, packs of circling wolves, tire-swallowing roads, and days when water was too scarce for washing and the bike pannier pantry too depleted to maintain anything other than a pulse and a steely resolve.
Moments brushed with beauty – waking to skies seared with the pink glaze of the rising sun, being hijacked by kindness when it was the most needed – helped to dissolve the knot of anxiety that must have been ever present for these women adventurers.
Refusing to be restrained by motherhood, Murphy had her daughter, by the age of five, exploring the knife-edged valleys of the Indus River on horseback with her, “existing on unmentionable things cooked in rancid fat, a few apricot kernels and little else.”
Grandchildren followed suit, with grandma, into her eighties, piloting them on journeys through Cuba and the newly emerging countries in Eastern Europe.
And if it wasn’t ‘trusty steeds’ like single-speed touring bikes that were providing the adventurous with the means to navigate off-grid areas of the world, it was the small single-engine plane.
Beryl Markham, daughter of a British horse trainer who relocated to Kenya, took up flying in between her duties as her father’s apprentice, and became one of the most legendary bush pilots in the world.
Scouting big-game animals in the Kenyan highlands and the Serengeti plains for prospective hunters, Markham’s reputation as a skilled and daring aviator rivaled that of Denys Finch-Hatten, who many of us met in the movie Out of Africa.
Fearless and unstoppable, Markham took on the challenge of being the first person to fly from London to New York across the Atlantic.
She fell short of her destination (crash landing her plane in Cape Breton), but not her goal – to successfully make the more difficult non-stop east-west transatlantic flight.
Flying at night, pitting her will against a wall of westerlies on a venture that no one had yet survived, it is hard to imagine the presence of mind it took to keep the plane airborne and terror at bay.
Recapturing that experience in her memoir West with the Night won the accolades of both Ernest Hemingway and The National Geographic who, in 2004, ranked it #8 of its 100 best adventure books. securing her reputation not only as an audacious aviator, but a compelling wordsmith.
And while Markham was “turning right at the next star and flying straight on till morning” (thank you, J. M. Barrie!), American journalist Martha Gellhorn was travelling around the US, chronicling the everyday lives of the hungry and the homeless during the Great Depression.
Funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, her investigation was abruptly discontinued when she joined in solidarity with her respondents at an anti-government demonstration. It would not be the last time Gellhorn put her humanity before professional obligations.
A nose for the harrowing and the heroic soon plunged Gellhorn into work as a war correspondent. Beginning with the civil war in Spain, Gellhorn, along with her then-husband, Ernest Hemingway, were called to a number of battlefronts in both Europe and the South-East Asia during World War II. She was the only woman to land in Normandy on D-Day June 6, 1944, a feat achieved by passing as a nurse on a hospital ship bound for the area, and as a stretcher bearer once ashore.
A compulsion to “follow the war wherever I could reach it” was to end her marriage but fan her career.
Hired to cover the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, she enjoyed a particular fruitful decade in her seventies reporting on the civil wars in Central America, and establishing a home base in Kenya.
Peripatetic by nature, Gellhorn’s nesting places served as refuges while on assignment and as oases when off-duty.
Irked by domesticity and “the certainty of the shape of the days,” she confessed that “the aimless life of a gypsy is all that now charms me.”
To her, it was travel that offered “the final joy of living, the delight of surprise, the delight of glimpses into lives, the lightness and the freedom.”
These are but a handful of the many women in the past who have blazed inspirational paths for others to follow.
Joining them most recently has been filmmaker Dianne Whelan, who, in 2021, completed a 24,000 kilometre trek on the world’s longest multi-use trail network in the world: The Trans Canada Trail.
Propelled by bike, boots, a paddle and a knack for averting danger, the trek – over 487 different land/route routes that straddled three oceans and a gazillion wildlife habitats – took six years to complete and another three to turn into the moving documentary 500 Days in the Wild. For Whelan, and all the bold women before her, “walking one’s own path, on one’s own feet, using one’s own eyes and mind and heart, despite one’s own fear” was as essential as breathing. And the fact that their vision and courage continued to burn bright throughout their lives is a positive reminder of the power of action, the genius of human resourcefulness and the magic of the indomitable spark within us all.
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