Christina Dodwell

Christina Dodwell FRGS (born 1 February 1951) is a British explorer, travel writer, and lecturer. She is Chairman of the Dodwell Trust and was awarded the Mungo Park Medal in 1989.

Dodwell has travelled in West Africa, the former Rhodesia, Papua New Guinea, Turkey, China, Afghanistan, Madagascar, Siberia, and Kurdistan, by horse, canoe, elephant, camel and microlight, and has published books and articles about many of

She also travelled with David Roberts David Roberts.

Life Dodwell was born in 1951 in Nigeria to British parents, Christopher Bradford Dodwell DFC, late the Glider Pilot Regiment, and Evelyn Dodwell (née Beddow). Her parents had married in England on 11 May 1946, and her father became the District Officer in Oyo, Nigeria, where he was also a writer on Nigerian topics. Her mother and grandmother had both grown up in China, and Dodwell said in 1996 "I don't know where I belong. My family thought it was totally normal that I had a larger view of the world."

When she was six, Dodwell's family returned to live in London, England. She was educated at Southover Manor School, Lewes, and Beechlawn College, Oxford. She was arrested in Gonbad and Kurdistan. by the crocodile people of the New Guinea lowlands. Her shoulder was scarred with a scaly pattern imitating one found on a crocodile's forehead. In Kenya, she was paralysed for ten days by the bite of a hunting spider.

There is little that she refuses to eat. Looking beyond elephant's trunk, crocodile's tail, and hump of rhinoceros, she said in an interview "When one's eaten maggots three or four times one isn't squeamish, and if someone brings you a bowlful that they've spent the day gathering it would be impolite to go 'urgh!'... I seem able to eat anything without ill effects, although I had one bad day after eating a piece of rotten camel."

Altogether, by 1997 she had visited some eighty countries.

In 1990, she was appointed as an Attaché at the London Consulate of the Republic of Madagascar, continuing with this until 2005.

Dodwell's nine books have been translated into five other languages. She has also made three television films and more than forty radio documentaries for BBC Radio 4, has lectured at the Royal Geographical Society, London, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Edinburgh, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Explorers Club of New York City. In 2009, she made a documentary for BBC Radio 4 on indigenous culture in Ethiopia. After her husband's death, she explored living with her widowed sister in Gloucestershire, appearing in an episode of the BBC's "Escape to the Country." She now lives on a farm, but still spends much of her time in Africa.

Major publications Travels with Fortune – an African Adventure (1979) Travels in Papua New Guinea (1982) An Explorer's Handbook: An Unconventional Guide for Travellers to Remote Regions – Travel, Survival, and Bush Cookery (1984) River Journeys (with Russell Braddon, Germaine Greer, William Shawcross, Brian Thompson, and Michael Wood) (London: BBC Books, 1984) A Traveller in China (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985) A Traveller on Horseback in Eastern Turkey and Iran (1987) Travels with Pegasus: a Microlight Journey Across West Africa (1989) Beyond Siberia (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993) Madagascar Travels (1995)

Other publications Preface to Richard Barnes, Eye on the Hill – Horse Travels in Britain (1987)

Honours Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, 1982 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for film River Journey – Waghi, 1985 Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, 1989