Before a walk, Marquis piles
on weight, and trains to carry 30
kilograms. The preparation is also
psychological, she shares. “By the
time I take that first step, 50 percent
of the expedition is done! I know what
to do from there. I know how to walk.”
In 2015, she faced her toughest
challenge yet: crossing the sparse,
hostile Kimberley in Australia. “My
question was: Would I be able to
survive like the aboriginal people
survived for thousands of years?
I knew this expedition would be the
hardest thing I would ever do. But, if
I’d know how difficult it was to be,
I would have never started it.”
Unlike the expedition across Asia,
the challenges of the Kimberley were
not human-related. First, she faced the
problem of moving herself across an
excruciatingly harsh landscape. Then,
she needed to catch her own food, and
find water in an area that, ordinarily,
has hardly any – even less so during
the drought in which she found
herself. Marquis is also vegetarian,
although she has had to kill animals
for food on previous expeditions.
“I did not like that process at all,”
she says. When she walked the
Kimberly, she stuck to fish. “There
is a process of consciousness going
through those steps in catching it,
LEft Marquis has tried to walk
with company but admits that
a key part of the experience is
being alone
bottom LEft Marquis carries
around 30 kilograms of gear
on her back during an expedition“We are sometimes more
scared of the prospect of
pain than the pain itself”
Sarah Marquiscleaning it, cooking it. Most of us don’t
do this anymore. But when I’m on an
expedition I’m a hunter-gatherer.
I really go back to our roots.”
Despite conceding to this dietary
change, she was starving – really
starving. “To be that hungry is like
having a monster inside of you. You
think you’re strong in those moments?
No. But then you realise, you have to
find that strength. You cannot die. So
finally, you open a door inside you that
you didn’t know you had. We are so
strong; we actually have no idea.”
But worse than hunger was running
out of water. “After three days, I
started to head into the red zone. It
was over 4 0 oC. The thirst completely
took over from the hunger.” She dug a
hole in the dry riverbed and finally,
the water came up.
What about the snakes? I pitch in.
“Snakes?” she scoffs jovially. “Snakes
were OK. The man-eating crocodiles
on the other hand...”
At what point does she make
the decision to call for help? When she
was in Laos, she contracted dengue
fever. She tied herself to a tree, so
that she wouldn’t rush into the river in
her delirium, and drown. “I knew the
symptoms. I knew it was dengue.
I knew I had to just ride it out. I just
had to get through three days of hell.You get ready. We are sometimes
more scared of the prospect of pain
than the pain itself.”
In Mongolia, she had a tooth
infection. In that case, she had to be
airlifted out. “I could feel my brain
going numb. I instantly knew that this
was life-threatening, and I made the
call,” she says. After recovering, she
returned to the exact same position to
continue her journey.
Beyond her explorative curiosity,
the message of her walking is a call
for us to re-establish our language
with Nature. “We have lost touch,
and it’s important that we reconnect.
People are reluctant to make real
changes because they’re put out of
their comfort zone. I show people
what happens when you take yourself
out of your comfort zone: It is the
most freeing, incredible, refreshing
sensation you can have.” agSarah’s new book, Instinct, will be
released in December 2017. She is
also the author of Wild By Nature,
and is a National Geographic
explorer. For more information,
visit http://www.sarahmarquis.ch