In honour of International Women’s Day I have decided to write something about the women I most envy: the explorers.
Remember learning about Magellan? Columbus? Sturt? Flinders? Cook? The thing they had most in common wasn’t only that they explored the world, it was that they all had penises. And having penises also gave them the means to embark on their expeditions because they had wives at home to take care of all that meaningless stuff, like raising children, cooking food, and making sure the house wasn’t coated in dust or covered in mould.
Meanwhile, some very fearless women were undertaking their own journeys.
The first female explorer I heard of was Freya Stark, and that was only because she was British and I was in London at the time of her death in 1993 at the age of 100. At the time I was surprised I’d never heard of her before and the thing I remember being most reported about her was not so much her travels, but the fact that she’d been almost completely scalped at the age of 13 when her hair was caught in a machine.
I feel some affinity for Freya because, like me, she was a sickly child and therefore, like me, did a lot of reading. After reading One Thousand and One Nights she became obsessed with the Middle East and spent her life until her retirement in the ’70s travelling in the region on and off.
I have a similar obsession with the Arctic after reading about Iceland as a teenager. But unlike Freya I have not learned Icelandic or any other Scandinavian, Russian, or Inuit language. I can however say sorry in Danish and Swedish (Unskyld and Förlåt) and now automatically reply with Tak and Ja because I watch too much Scandi Noir. (Too much? Not possible!)
Gertrude Stein similarly spent the early part of the 20th Century wandering about in the Middle East. I read on Wikipedia that “History was one of the few subjects women were allowed to study [at Oxford], due to the many restrictions imposed on them at the time” and that “she was the first woman to graduate from Modern History with first class honours”. A terrible movie was made about her, starring Nicole Kidman. Pretty sure Gertrude didn’t emerge from the desert with flawless skin and clean, matching outfits, but I do hope she spent her evenings sitting at a table writing by candle-light with a pen dipped in ink.
My great heroine, though, is the Irish explorer and writer Dervla Murphy. Dervla was pulled out of school at the age of 14 to come home and look after her mother who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. She continued to care for her, drinking a lot of whisky and chain-smoking to cope, until her mother died. By then Dervla was 31. She closed up the house, got herself a gun, and got on her bike and rode. All the way from Dublin to India. For the next 50 years she travelled by bike, on foot, on mule, with and without her daughter, and wrote 26 books. Her last Between River and Sea about her time living in the West Bank in Palestine, was published in 2015. She resigned herself, at the age of 84, to staying put. Since a hip replacement she can no longer ride a bike, she used to love swimming but now her shoulder is no good, and all those cigarettes have given her emphysema. Still, 84!
Many of the places these fearless women travelled are no longer accessible because the inhabitants are all fighting with each other. I want to go to Timbuktu. The official advice says Do Not Travel, the Lonely Planet says Mali is great but not safe to travel there at the moment, and you can’t get travel insurance (as though any of those women ever did). I actually called a guy named Phil Paoletta who runs Postcards from Timbuktu in Mali’s capital, Bamako. He told me you can’t get near Timbuktu; the soldiers will turn you around if you try. He did however suggest stowing away in a boat on the Niger river. Yeah, that’d work.
So for now I must content myself with my previous–rather pale in comparison–expeditions to Lo Manthang and the Arctic Tundra, (Inuvik! You’re welcome kids!) and look toward my next journeys into the somewhat unknown. If only, like Dervla, I could happily sleep in a puddle of freezing water!
A Journey to Lo Monthang 