A casualty of the internet and satellite mapping is the explorer. Before technology, Huen Tsang, Marco Polo and Columbus explored uncharted lands, discovered new civilisations and opened the eyes of the world to horizons beyond maps that warned seafarers that if they sailed far enough, their ship could fall off the earth because it was flat.
All legendary travellers were tough men. Not Ella Maillart, one of the greatest travellers of the 20th century.
On the 90th anniversary of her first adventure in the 1930s, the Swiss woman is a gender statement to the lost world of dangerous curiosity—exploration. Maillart moved to India through Iran and Afghanistan. She spent the World War II years in India, staying in Tiruvannamalai near Madras close to Ramana Maharshi ashram.
It was in India where she discovered her spiritual side, which had begun with her fascination with the Orient.
She became a follower of Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon in Kerala, who founded the Direct Path philosophy.
In her autobiography, Cruises and Caravans (1942), Ella writes, “I began this journey by exploring the unmapped territory of my own mind.” She was an action junkie since early youth, representing Switzerland as the only woman competitor at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
Adventure coursed through her blood—she played a stuntwoman in German mountain films and an actress in a skiing movie. Her first serious trip was in 1922, taking a 21-foot boat from Cannes to Corsica when she was hardly 20.
She sailed with four girls following the trail of Ulysses to Ithaca. For a couple of years, carrying just a backpack, she set off solo through Central Asia, Turkestan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and cities such as Tashkent, Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara previously unknown to the West.
Stalinist Russia was a dangerous place for a woman. Alone, she skied up the Mountain Sari Tor. She travelled to the Caucasus and discovered the hidden valley of Svanetia.
All through Central Asia, where men regarded an unmarried woman as available, she took along syphilis medication in case she was raped; the acceptance of which, as motorcyclist traveller Heather Philips wrote,
“By re-framing such a destructive act of violence, she felt powerful. She didn’t shrink from the darkness, she leaned in.”
Well-known Indian women travellers like Shivya Nath and Rutavi Mehta revel in travelling solo. In the UK, 75 percent of Gen Z women have been backpacking or planning to set out.
Maillart, the pioneer of solo woman travellers, was the first to break the glass ceiling by courting danger and discover the unknown at a time when women wore skirts, not trousers.