Ella Maillart
An Olympic sailor who walked across the closed heart of Asia on a forged permit
Ella Maillart grew up sailing on Lake Geneva and represented Switzerland in sailing at the 1924 Olympics, then skied competitively and worked briefly in film before deciding that travel writing suited her better than any single sport. In the early 1930s she pushed into Soviet Central Asia, reaching Turkestan and the remote Kirghiz highlands at a time when Stalin's government made independent travel there almost impossible for a foreigner, and wrote up what she saw of collectivisation's cost in Turkestan Solo.
Her best-known journey came in 1935, when she teamed up with the British journalist Peter Fleming to travel overland from Beijing to Kashmir, a region convulsed by civil war and closed to outsiders. They posed as ordinary travellers, crossed the Taklamakan desert and the Tibetan plateau on foot, camel and horse, and arrived in India seven months later having covered roughly thirty-five hundred miles that neither government wanted them to cross. Each later published a separate account of the same trip, hers titled Forbidden Journey.
She went on travelling into old age, spending years in Nepal and India studying philosophy and religion, and remained a determinedly private figure who preferred the road to the lecture circuit. She died in Switzerland at ninety-four.