Sarah Marquis to walk alone from Siberia to Australia

Carrying all her equipment on her back, Sarah Marquis has been hiking across the globe for twenty years. She has explored the wilderness of Anatolia, New Zealand, the USA, Patagonia, the Andes Cordilleras mountain range and Australian desert, learning to survive on whatever nature can provide.

“People often ask me why I am doing this,” Sarah Marquis told Swisster, “but to be honest, I don’t know what to answer.”

Her next expedition, eXplorAsia 2010-2012, will commence in June and is the most ambitious so far, not least because Marquis will experience so many different environments and climates. Although she will walk entirely alone, a small team will assist her from afar.

The path Sarah Marquis will follow from Siberia to Australia

Beginning on her 38^th birthday in June, Sarah will start off from southern Siberia and Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater body of water in the world and known to be one of its richest biotopes. There she will fish for her food with a collapsible rod. She will then move down to neighbouring Mongolia and across to the Gobi desert in China.

“I want to see the wind shifting the sand on the grey dunes of the Gobi desert,” Marquis says.

Water remains the greatest challenge on expeditions of this kind, so Marquis then enumerates some of valuable techniques she has acquired, including capturing condensation from plants wrapped in a plastic sheet under the sun, or a cup set in a hole in the ground at night.

“If the pinched skin on your arm remains raised, you are in real danger of dehydration,” she advises on her website.

Crossing the Tibetan plateau, “the roof of the world” she will then climb over the Himalayan mountain range that culminates at almost 7,000 meters.

In the meantime, to help Marquis combat her debilitating mountain sickness, Dr. Claudio Sartori at the University Hospital in Lausanne, with the help of CSEM, a company that specializes in nanotechnology, will be responding to readings of Marquis’s heart beat and oxygen levels communicated to them once a day via satellite telephone.

After the Himalayans, Marquis drops down to the moist jungle conditions of Yunnan, in the far southwest corner of China that borders with Laos, her next destination.

Approximately every three months, which at the rate of 30 kilometres a day of walking represents about 9,000 kms in distance, Sarah Marquis meets up with Geraldine Lee, a perky young Brit who serves as her infrastructure and communication manager for a complete replacement of her equipment.

Periodic replacement of all the gear allows for adjustment to climate conditions

“Humidity is the curse of the walker. The chafing of clothes and shoes can break the skin and if infection sets in wounds have difficulty healing,” she says to explain the importance of adapting her gear to the climate.

In Laos and Vietnam, Marquis anticipates having to hunt for her food. A vegetarian since her early years, she has learned to feed herself on snakes and lizards when she can find nothing else. Her technique is to stun the animal or reptile with a projectile from a blowpipe or a slingshot. She then pounces to catch it.

“The first time is terrible, it really takes you out of your comfort zone,” she warns, “but survival instincts take over.”

Sarah Marquis knows that there are days when she will find nothing to eat. In anticipation of this and to counterbalance the 30 kilos she will need to carry – the equivalent of half her current weight – she plans to put on 15 kilos before she leaves.

A gruelling programme to build up her resistance and prepare her back to sustain the load has already begun.

Leaving the Asian continent, a cargo ship will then take her to Borneo, the third largest island in the world, where the vegetation is so thick that paths disappear into the jungle. This she admits is “the great unknown”.

Another is how people respond to a young woman travelling alone. “Nature is manageable, if you understand it. Even tigers, crocodiles and pumas are predictable. But man is not,” she says with a light shrug.

Until her last trip in 2006 to the Andes, Marquis had never used any means of communication to stay connected to the outside world. Now she will keep in touch with Gregory Barbezat, her expedition director in Lausanne, thanks to a satellite phone and a mini notebook charged up by solar energy captured by a flexible panel.

“But we’ve worked out an abridged code so that I only have punch in a number, say 28, to indicate that I’ve had a tiring day. I want to keep communication to a minimum.”

Fans will however be able to follow Sarah’s geo-localization over the months, but not in real time – for security reasons.

Following the lengthy stopover in Borneo, Marquis plans to catch a shrimp boat down to Australia.

“The last leg of the trip is the real reason I am doing this” Sarah Marquis reveals. “I know every plant, every animal in Kimberley, the western part of Australia, otherwise known as the home of Crocodile Dundee."

“Down on the southern edge where the earth reaches the sea and there is nothing else to see, at exactly GPS point S 32°23.002 E 124°36.972, there is a lone tree. I promised myself I would come back.”

The Desert Hiker by Sarah Marquis tells the enthralling story of the 14.000 kilometres covered in 17 months in the Australian desert, starting and finishing at Alice Springs, a place of symbolic significance for the Aborigines.

Along the way, D’Joe, a part-jackal dog who likes eating carrots and hates getting wet became her companion and has gained the status of media celebrity in his own right. He has now retired to a comfortable retreat in the Alpes.

The main sponsors (“I call them my partners” says Marquis) are:

Debiopharm, Whitepod, Gaz naturel and the Edipresse magazine, Femina.  The final objective of the bio-expedition is to help understand the psychological and physical limits of endurance of the human being.

More information on Sarah Marquis.