Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an explorer, born in Africa, she spent her early years running wild in the bush a

childhood experience which seems to have echoed throughout her life she was expelled

from English boarding schools and at the age of 24 left the cultivated life of London to

explore the whole of the African continent. In the 20 years since then she's made

many exciting and dangerous journeys, usually alone.

She's eaten with cannibals, been attacked by a lascivious sea captain

and arrested as a spy.

She admits it's a life she wouldn't have chosen.

But it happened, she says, and it felt right she is Christina

Doddwell what makes it the right life for you then Christina what drives you out

there I don't think that I'm particularly driven I think it just happens it's this business

of falling in at the deep end which tends to make it easier because like when I started

traveling and four of us set off with the Land Rover and then the two boys stole the Land Rover and vanished.

Suddenly all my hopes, all the dreams, all the preparations all went up in this kind of puff of smoke.

Then what drove me forwards was, well, let's just take a little look a bit further and just

check on around the next corner.

But what part does fear play in all of that then? Do you sometimes think, you must sometimes think, when you meet a Python in your path or this sea captain leaps on you, do you sometimes think, what an earth am I doing here, I should never have come.

There are times when one thinks, oh goodness, but in general the actually dangerous things

that happen like, for example, my first experience of white water rafting, going down the Wagi River in Papua New Guinea.

On about the third day my raft flipped upside down and I was underneath the rapids.

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