Sarah Marquis started her journey in Siberia and finished in the Australian outback.
ONE day, Sarah Marquis started walking. One foot in front of the other, she told herself. It would be three years before she stopped.
On her own in the wilderness, carrying a handful of possessions and aided only by her instincts and her sense of direction, the 43-year-old walked for 1000 days.
She struggled to find food at times and went days without sleep during a marathon journey north to south spanning the length of the globe.
She walked from Siberia to the Australian outback fighting off starvation, men who tried to steal her tent, scorching and subzero temperatures and her own demons.
Ms Marquis, whose book Wild by Nature was published on Wednesday, told news.com.au she never looked too far ahead and never acknowledged how far she had to go.
“I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself because they say each expedition starts when s**t happens. You can’t plan for it too far in advance and you have to be flexible.”
Sarah Marquis went from freezing in Siberia to stifling head in the Australian outback.Source:Supplied
During her trip — she passed through Siberia, Mongolia, China, Thailand and Australia — she was met by Mongolian thieves on horseback who, while drunk, found their way to her tent night after night and tried to fight their way in.
“In Mongolia, there was nowhere to hide,” Ms Marquis said. “They were completely drunk and came back every night for weeks. Every night they would try to take my tent with me in it.”
She said the attacks became difficult to deal with when she struggled to get restful sleep. The physical toll when she moved on was also a brutal grind.
She went through almost 10 pairs of hiking boots and dealt with dengue fever delirium in the Laos jungle and tropical ringworm in northern Thailand.
The hardest part? All of the first six months, she says.
“After six months of being in pain, one day I woke up in the middle of the Gobi Desert and nothing was painful.”
The Swiss national, speaking with news.com.au from New York, said she piled on the weight before leaving her home knowing she would likely go days, if not a week, without food.
“I put on 15kgs before I left and that saved me. I couldn’t have survived without that.”
A vegetarian, Ms Marquis said she never killed anything to survive. That too came at a cost to her food supplies.
“Sometimes I survived for months on a type of cookie that’s basically just flour and water. The fancy food was rice with a fried egg.”
Ms Marquis, whose walks in the wild over almost 25 years amount to an entire circumnavigation of the globe, is a big believer in cleaning out the system and getting away from our urban environment.
“The way we use our body in urban life is like putting bad fuel in a good car and expecting it to run well. When you put good fuel in and drive it hard it’s like cleaning all the pipes out. It’s the same with the mind. At the beginning I could hear the voices of all my family and friends but eventually that faded.”
When it was all over and Ms Marquis was alone under a tree she pictured years earlier, she said it was a mix of satisfaction and sadness.
Struggling: Sarah Marquis had good and bad days during her three years on the road.Source:Supplied
“It was a big achievement but it was bittersweet. I finished at a small tree I’d slept under before in the Nullabor Plain in South Australia. When I left the first time I said: ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be back’.”
She kept her promise and said she wrote the book because she wanted to prove what women could achieve.
“I wrote about this because I’m the girl next door, I’m just like every other woman,” she said.
“I wanted to show other women what we can do. I think as Western women we’re lucky to have the freedoms we have but other women don’t have the same freedoms. My trip was about telling women we all need to do something about that.”
Since returning, Ms Marquis says she’s been on another, equally awe-inspiring journey. For three months, she survived in the Australian outback on only her knowledge of the area and her understanding of where to find food.
“It was crazy,” she says. “The first 1.5 months was just me with crocodiles and snakes. I had to be more than prepared. I had to know all the birds and all the plants because when you put everything together it’s like a treasure map.”
Her goal was simple. It was the same the first time she set off into the unknown.
“I want to be one with the land.”
Sarah Marquis where it all ended, under a lone tree in the South Australian outback. Picture: Lynn WebbSource:Supplied
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