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.

Adams, born in California in 1875, tracked more than 100,000 miles just in South America, many of those miles on a nearly three-year journey in the early 1900s with her husband traveling on horseback, train, and boat. The trip resulted in Adams leading her first lecture for National Geographic and ultimately her 30-year career writing more than 20 stories for National Geographic magazine. She also helped found the Society of Women Geographers and during World War, I was the only female war correspondent for