Rosita Forbes
Rosita Forbes was born in 1893 and later married a soldier with whom she travelled to India, China, Australia and South Africa. During the first world war she worked as an ambulance driver and received two medals for her war services from the French government.
Forbes had the gift of the genuine traveller: she lived and mixed with the locals, frequenting bazaars and making friends with the Arabs, Afghans, Indians, Tadjiks, Usbegs and Kazaks. After a visit to England, Forbes travelled to Morocco and then went to Abyssinia where she made a travel film entitled From Red Sea to Blue Nile.
Later she visited Persia and in 1930 travelled through Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordania. Her other travels took her to South America, Russia and from Kenya to the Gold Coast.
Rosita Forbes was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society.
“The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan....”
“In real life, the big things and the little things are inextricably mixed up together, so in Libya at one moment, one worried because one's native boots were full of holes, and at the next, perhaps, one wondered how long one would be alive to wear them.”
“We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.”
“The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.”
“The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.”