In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, two Swiss women decided to drive a Ford from Geneva to Kabul.
One of them was running out of time, and they both knew it.
The driver was Annemarie Schwarzenbach – a Swiss industrialist’s daughter, archaeologist and journalist who’d been gifted the car by her father. The other was Ella Maillart – Olympic sailor, elite skier and an intrepid traveller who’d already crossed from Beijing to India by camel, lorry and foot with Bond author Ian Fleming’s older brother.
Schwarzenbach had a secret, but Maillart was eager to go, so off they went – through the Balkans, across Turkey and Iran, over the Hindu Kush, and into Kabul, arriving in Afghanistan just as war broke out in Europe behind them.
When they arrived, they found a country with its own problems: a king exiled a decade earlier for unveiling Kabul, girls’ schools operating unofficially against the objections of the clergy, and women whose identities were being completely erased.
The women recorded the journey in two separate books: The Cruel Way (Maillart) and All the Roads Are Open (Schwarzenbach) – but readers may wonder if they’re even on the same road, never mind sitting next to each other in the same car.
In this episode, Sarah and Jeremiah discuss the differing versions: Schwarzenbach’s desperate need to escape and Maillart’s doomed conviction that distance could cure any problem; travelling as women who were often read as men; and the beautiful but complicated Afghanistan they drove into.
