This author embodies immense courage, a keen eye for detail, and an insatiable curiosity about local people and their cultures, placing her among legendary explorers. Her literary style is imbued with profound respect for traditions and rich insights drawn from extraordinary adventures across continents. Through her writings, she shares a unique perspective shaped by journeys through Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Her work explores the human experience with a deep sense of detail and an understanding of diverse cultures.
A remarkable journey unfolds as Christina Dodwell, at just twenty-four, embarks on a three-year adventure across Africa. Stranded in Nigeria after her companions abandon her, she showcases incredible resilience and humor while traveling by horse, camel, and on foot. Her experiences include sharing meals with cannibals, encounters with witch-doctors, and navigating the Congo River in a dugout canoe. This travel narrative vividly captures the essence of Africa and reflects on the transformative impact of her journey on her identity and innocence.
In the late 1980s, Christina Dodwell moves from a Greek Easter into a chilly Eastern Turkish spring, not improved for the cold and hungry traveller by the fairly strict observance of Ramadan. Retreating east, she visits the buried cities and rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia on the first of a number of hired, borrowed or bought horses, the ideal liberating companions for her unconventional style of travel.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.
