It is a land of exiles and their outcast descendants, of scientists and would-be exploiters of its oil, gold and caviar. It is also home to various indigenous reindeer-herding peoples whose way of life was rapidly being extinguished under the steamroller of communist state education until perestroika acknowledged these ethnic peoples. Foreign travel became possible and Christina Dodwell was one of the first to explore Kamchatka, that exposed peninsular reaching a thousand kilometres south into the Pacific.

She chose to travel during the last months of winter, learning to herd reindeer and drive both reindeer and dogs, skiing frozen rivers, meeting vulcanologists and geologists working in the geyser region of the south. She also tracked bears on a preserve usually forbidden to outsiders.

In addition, Christina travelled with a dance troupe entertaining the scattered communities of reindeer herdsmen, while a man from the ministry on the same helicopter explained why there was no cash to pay them.

Madagascar is an island of secrets, where new species of wildlife continue to be discovered and rumours of mysterious aboriginals and natural phenomena persist in the forest. Christina Dodwell explores its least accessible corners and makes friends with its people.

Her four-month journey began in the highlands where, travelling by horse-drawn stagecoach, she encounters a healer, a village poet and families who perform bone-turning rites for their ancestors.

Taboos, fetishes and astrology weave through her travels among wood-carvers and lead to a royal meeting. Christina paddles her canoe on the south-east coastal rivers and makes plans to enter the capital’s Grand Prix horse race.

In the remote west of the island she threads her way between amazing limestone pinnacles in an area normally reserved for scientists, navigating canyons and river tunnels where crocodiles live on blind white fish.

Travelling by ox cart and on foot, she enjoys Madagascar’s rich plant life and learns how this invaluable genetic bank is at risk, while delving into prehistory leads her in search of one of the world’s largest fossilised forests.

Christina’s great courage, open mind and unbounded curiosity enable her to go to places few would dare visit, and she almost invariably finds kindness and hospitality wherever she travels.

A four-day bus journey to Kashgar begins Christina’s journey, followed by a canoe journey from Lake Karakol. She followed Marco Polo’s route to Beijing, past the ruined cities of the Silk Road. In Xinjiang she spent time with migrating Kazakhs setting up their summer camp. Her canoe journey on the Yellow River resulted in her finding a hitherto-unknown portion of the Great Wall, and in Beijing she tracked down the house in which her grandmother had lived in the time of the warlords. In a side trip to Tibet, Christina spent time in a nomad tent, sharing the elaborate plaiting and ornamentation ritual of a women’s hairdressing session.

Christina joins Chinese tourists when she visits the oldest surviving frescoes in China, the Xian terracotta army, and spends a few days at the famous lamasery of Taer’si. She witnessed the dragon boat race on Lake Er Hai, But her most precious moments were camping alone on the edge of an ice-bound lake, finding a way to unvisited beehive tombs in the Gobi, climbing a remote sacred mountain in Yunnan Province and paddling her small canoe cautiously into the mighty Yangtse.

While the snow still clothes the eastern mountains, the Long Rider moves further east over the border into Iran, to a ranch breeding miniature Caspian horses near the Russian frontier, to the salt desert villages of the south-east, and on into Pakistan for a visa renewal, the unity of her journey maintained by the fact that she is still within the confines of the Persian empire, as she celebrates the end of Ramadan in a festive village near the Afghan border.

Back in Iran, she visits the crumbling grandiloquence of lost empires at Pasargad, Naksh-i-Rustam and Persepolis, as well as the trouble spots of yesterday and today in the valleys of the Assassins and Kurdistan. But her journey reaches its happiest fulfilment back in Eastern Turkey when she buys a fine grey Arab stallion called Keyif — the name aptly means high-spirited. Together they travel among snow caps, salt lakes, nomadic summer camps and lowland rice paddies, across mountain country from Erzurum to Lake Van, up the Russian border to Mount Ararat, and discover the unexpected pleasures and hazards of remote mountain life.

The Sunday Telegraph has described Christina as “a natural nomad” and wrote of “her courage and insatiable wanderlust.”

Christina has the gift to communicate the zest for adventure, and even the occasional night in an Iranian police cell cannot dim her sheer delight in travelling to remote and challenging places.

This is the story of a young Englishwoman who set out to travel alone through the highlands, jungles and rivers of Papua New Guinea. It is the remarkable tale of a two-year expedition which included an eventful two-week walk and a thousand-mile journey on a stallion (in a country where almost nobody knew what a horse was) during which Christina witnessed a tribal fight with bows and arrows and a pig-killing celebration. She was accosted by bandits, sank into swamps, fell through rotten bridges and got stuck in a ravine.

For the fourth stage of Christina’s journey she bought a dugout canoe and spent four months paddling alone on the Sepik River and its tributaries. She met Stone-Age tribes and ventured through swamp forests; she spent four days with a team of crocodile-hunters and learned how to skin the animals; she was arrested as a spy and experienced an earthquake. In a remote village on the Blackwater tributary she arrived during preparations for the initiation of some boys into manhood. She stayed during a week of celebrations leading up to the boys’ initiation, which took place in the spirit-house and included a bloody skin-cutting ritual dedicated to crocodiles.

Christina’s journeys around this remarkable country have become legends which endure to this day.

Recounted with modesty and good humour, it is a story of great tenacity and incredible courage. Christina travelled by horse, camel, on foot, hitching lifts from time to time—even hailing passing airplanes out of the sky!

The author shared meals with cannibals, was treated by witch-doctors, learned to pan gold, and was imprisoned on a boat by a sexually perverse sea captain. She and her friend journeyed almost a thousand miles down the Congo River in a dugout canoe: the first women in the world to accomplish such a hazardous journey.

This is a truly extraordinary travel book. It is a brilliant account of Africa, its sights and smells, its many races, seen through the eyes of an English girl. It is also the story of the education of innocence, a deeply honest self-portrait of Christina Dodwell’s reactions to herself in Africa—and how Africa changed her.