Solo adventurer Sarah Marquis treks for three months across the Australian outback

Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis completed a gruelling journey pushing 60kg of water and food and carrying a 22kg backpack.

Sarah Marquis did not speak to another person for six weeks during her desert trek. Picture: The Times

For almost 30 years the Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis has pursued silence – walking thousands of kilometres, mostly alone, across the emptiness of the Australian outback.

Marquis, 51, has come back time and again from her tiny chalet in the Swiss Alps. She has trekked, she estimates, more than 25,000km across its vast deserts, the forests of Tasmania and the ancient stone country of the northwest.

On her latest journey she completed a gruelling three-month solo trek over hundreds of kilometres that traversed Western Australia’s Great Victoria Desert, where she did not speak to a soul for six weeks.

Pushing a cart loaded with 60kg of food and water and carrying a 22kg backpack, Marquis began from the goldmining centre of Kalgoorlie. She walked 380km east along a railway line to the hamlet of Rawlinna and then 650km north to the tiny Aboriginal community of Warburton.

“The Great Victoria Desert is really the remotest one,” she told The Times from Adelaide on Friday. “There are not many places on this planet where you get the luxury to listen to silence.”

The trek covered hundreds of kilometres that traversed Western Australia’s Great Victoria Desert.

She revelled in the solitude but worried about finding water. “But you have to let go of control … and just trust the universe a little bit,” she said. “The only solution to understand the planet and ourselves is really to reconnect with nature.”

Marquis, who writes about her travels, did not feel vulnerable, she said: “I’m not a woman out there, I’m part of nature. I understand the land.”

The Times