“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it,” wrote British Arabist Freya Stark in Baghdad Sketches.

When she died at 100 years old, this audacious cultural explorer and polyglot had written 24 books and published eight volumes of letters that detail her achievements as the first Westerner to reach a number of southern Arabian desert regions. Among her dangerous treks was a journey to the heart of Iran’s Valley of the Assassins, a foreboding landscape that reinforced her love for the personal focus that travel can bring.

“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given,” she wrote. Stark’s humorous and authoritative chronicles of her travels to Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen, Lebanon, Turkey, and Afghanistan seem to suggest that within every traveler beats the heart of an explorer—especially when donkeys are involved.

10 Badass Travelers Throughout History

These trailblazers staged epic journeys across new lands, broke cultural barriers, and revealed the radical diversity of the world around us.