WILD WOMEN THROUGH THE YEARS

The aptly named Aloha Wanderwell, as a teenager in the Twenties, hopped into a Ford Model T and whizzed her way across 75 countries. Stranded in Brazil, she lived with the Bororo people; when stuck for fuel, she ingeniously combined bananas and animal fat to power her car. Later, her husband died in mysterious circumstances so she chopped off her hair and joined the French Foreign Legion. I suspect that many of us might have seen such a tragedy as an opportunity for early retirement.

A name that every girl and boy should learn to revere along with Edmund Hillary: Junko Tabei, the Japanese mountaineer and the first woman to climb Everest leading an all-female group. She was still pursuing her passion, leading climbing trips, three months before her death in her late seventies.

Robyn Davidson, who trekked 1,700 miles (2,370km) across the deserts of Western Australia with a dog and four camels in the Seventies, wrote Tracks – an extraordinary account of her courage and determination. In the early 1900s, Juanita Harrison, an African-American, was determined to explore the world. She set out with minimal funds but enormous resolve, just 40 years after slavery was abolished. Her utterly charming but out-of-print account of her travels from the Middle East to mainland Europe, My Great, Wide, Beautiful

World,

Girl power started early for 19th-century BFFs Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who traversed remote China in a horse and cart, crossing the Gobi Desert an astonishing (and unappealingsounding) five times!

Moments of recognition for these explorers are so rare that when Ernest