Top 5 Female World-Travellers

Celebrating International Women's Day today, the Travel Times team though today would be a good day to look back on some of the past and present female world-travellers, who not only ventured to amazing places across the globe, but changed the world for the better!

1. Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart was an aviation pioneer. She developed a passion for adventure at a young age, steadily gaining flying experience from her twenties. In 1928, she became a celebrity after becoming the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane. In 1932, she became the first woman to make a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for her achievement.

It only took a single plane ride at an air show in California and Earhart was hooked: ‘By the time I had got 200 or 300 feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly,’ said the American aviation trailblazer. Working as a truck driver, photographer and stenographer to save for flying lessons, she secured her license and bought a yellow bi-plane she named The Canary, going on to break records, from highest altitude climbs to fastest flights.

Her dream of circumnavigating the globe ‘as near its waistline as could be’ led to her last flight.On July 2, 1937, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. During her life, Earhart embraced celebrity culture.

2. Jane Goodall

Dame Jane Morris Goodall is an English zoologist, primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, after 60 years' studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960. In April 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.

Goodall was 10, reading Dr Doolittle and Tarzan, when she decided ‘to live with wild animals in Africa’. After school, a friend invited her to Kenya and she worked as a waitress to save up for her boat passage to Mombasa in 1957. There she met the palaeontologist Louis Leakey who gave her the opportunity to work as a chimpanzee researcher, even fast-tracking her place at Cambridge so she would be qualified. She then spent half a century observing the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, tearing up the book on what we thought we knew of animal behaviour and inspiring a cultish obsession with our closest relative in the animal kingdom.

On her travels, Goodall drags around a suitcase she named the Coffin, full of books, a single-cup electrical-heating element and a jar of Marmite, and always carries a stuffed toy monkey called Mr H.

3. Woni Spotts

   
   

   

   Woni Spotts is the first female black woman to travel to every country and continent in the world. In 1979, when she was 15, Nolan Davis,a friend of her father's, offered her work as the subject of a documentary he was producing that involved significant overseas travel. She told the Mirror: "We started in the Caribbean and then went to South America. The next year was Asia, and the next year was Africa, then we ended in Europe." By 1982, she had visited more than 160 countries. During this time she kept detailed records as part of her work on the documentary. She resumed her travels in 2013 and completed them in 2018. Most of her travel was not documented via social media, which means that her title has been in some contention.

   
   

   If she had to return to a county Spotts said she would go back to South Africa toexperience more tribal interactions and see more of the natural settings and penguin spotting. The best food she ever had was in India, America, Mexico, and Thailand...and all the countries bordering the Mediterranean.

   
   

4. Freya Stark

   
   

   

   
   

   Freya Stark was an English-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.

   
   

   For her ninth birthday, Stark received a copy of One Thousand and One Nights and became fascinated with the Orient. She was often ill while young and confined to the house, so she found an outlet in reading. She delighted in reading French, in particular Alexandre Dumas. When she was thirteen, in an accident in a factory in Italy, her hair was caught in a machine, tearing her scalp and ripping her right ear off. She had to spend four months getting skin grafts in hospital, which left her face disfigured. She usually wore hats or bonnets, often flamboyant ones, to cover her scars. At the age of 30, hoping to escape her life as a flower farmer in northern Italy, Stark chose to study languages at university. She chose to study Arabic and later, Persian. She studied at Bedford College, London and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

   
   

   Stark had no formal education as a child, but she moved about with her artist parents and learned French, German, and Italian before she entered the University of London in 1912. After working as a nurse in Italy during World War I, she returned to London to attend the School of Oriental Studies. In her first major book, The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Stark established her style, combining practical travel tips with an entertaining commentary on the people, places, customs, and history of Persia (now Iran). Thereafter, she traveled extensively in the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, where she made her home. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information in Aden, Baghdad, and Cairo, where she founded the anti-Nazi Brotherhood of Freedom. She later visited Asia, notably Afghanistan and Nepal.

   
   

   She died at Asolo on 9 May 1993, a few months after her hundredth birthday

   
   

5. Kris Tompkins

   
   

   

   
   

   Kristine Tompkins (born June 1950) is an American conservationist. Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc.

   
   

   In 1993, Tompkins retired from Patagonia and married Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face clothing company and co-founder of Esprit. The Tompkinses moved to Chile and focused their efforts on the preservation of national parks and established several nonprofit organizations including the Conservation Land Trust, The Foundation For Deep Ecology and Conservacion Patagonica, all of which have now consolidated under Tompkins Conservation.

   
   

   In 1991, Doug Tompkins began acquiring private land for conservation in Chile’s Los Lagos Region, managing it as a public-access park within the threatened Valdivian temperate rainforest. Pumalín Park received official nature sanctuary status in 2005 and became a national park in 2018. This designation followed Tompkins Conservation's donation of nearly 725,000 acres to help establish the new park, Pumalin Douglas Tompkins National Park, which covers approximately 1 million acres. It is named in honor of its founder.