Inspiring Journeys

Follow in the footsteps of adventurous women who made travel history.

- MARLENE GOLDMAN

“There is no reason why a woman cannot go wherever a man goes, and further. If a woman be fond of travel, if she has love of the strange, the mysterious and the lost, there is nothing that will keep her at home … .” — Harriett Chalmers Adams, 1920.

Harriett Chalmers Adams was not on my radar when I hopped on a Greyhound bus solo from Sydney to Darwin in Australia in my early 20s. I had no plan until I answered an ad at a travel center posted by a solo Swiss woman with a car looking for a travel buddy. We drove for a month down the west coast to Perth, camping or sleeping in the backseat most of the way, our own version of Thelma and Louise.

I hadn’t heard of Adams when I spent nearly a year traveling in Southeast Asia mainly solo, or the five months I spent backpacking my way through East Africa on my own, including an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro with my local guide. But I have nonetheless channeled her spirit and that of a host of other intrepid women, many of whom conquered great swaths of the world without the benefits of planes, high-tech trekking shoes, or GPS and Google Translate on their phones.