Ella Maillart (1903–1997)

Ella Maillart was born to a wealthy family in Geneva, Switzerland. Her father was Swiss and her mother Danish. As a child, she loved reading maps and adventure books and decided to become an athlete. At age of 20, she sailed with a friend from Cannes to Corsica, then to Sardinia, Sicily and Greece. In 1924, she became the only female competitor in the Summer Olympics single-handed yacht sailing event; she finished ninth out of a field of 17. At this time, she was also the captain of the Swiss women's field hockey team and a member of its international ski team. From the 1930s, she spent years exploring the Muslim majority republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia. She published a series of books such as Turkestan Solo: A Journey Through Central Asia (1932) that, along with her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. There she met Peter Fleming, a writer and correspondent for The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse, and camel. Maillart later recorded this trek in her book Forbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming's parallel account is found in his News from Tartary. In 1937, Maillart returned to Asia for Le Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. In 1939, she took a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Maillart's book about this experience, which was cut short by the outbreak of World War II, was called The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford.
She spent the war years in the south of India, learning from different teachers about Hindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she continued to ski until late in life, and last traveled to Tibet in 1986.
She also made documentary films on Afghanistan, Nepal, and South India that today are part of the collection of the Swiss Film Archive in Lausanne, Switzerland.