A photograph in her autobiography Cruises and Caravans (1942) shows her as the only woman in the Swiss ladies' ski team wearing a skirt. She was a natural athlete and wrote that "with sailing, hockey, and skiing as main amusements I could bear the boredom of school." Her skiing became so accomplished that between 1931-34 she was a member of the Swiss National Ski Team. She was entranced by the lake, where she learned to sail, and in 1924 she represented Switzerland as the only woman in single-handed yachting at the Paris Olympics. It was this inquisitiveness which makes her part of the tradition of great women travellers she had an interest in understanding the how and why of other people's lives, rather more than in straight exploration.Įlla Maillart, known as Kini, was born in Geneva in 1903 she was a sickly child until, aged ten, she and her family started to spend the summer months on Lake Geneva. "To dawdle is my usual fashion, as if I had the whole of eternity before me." This sums up Ella Maillart's approach to travel she liked travelling slowly, absorbing the culture, and she understood the importance of finding the similarities rather than the differences between people.
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