Flying the flag for brave and adventurous women, Jacki Hill-Murphy MA, FRGS, and new resident to Kilmersdon, will be helping her village in their quest for a new Community Shop and Café by hosting a talk about her Amazonian adventures.

Jacki is an explorer, writer and speaker, who has travelled to some of the most inhospitable places on earth to recreate the journeys of daring women adventurers from the past. In tracking valiant women who left inhibition at home and journeyed into the unknown, she pays tribute to their invincible spirits and achievements.

She has followed in the footsteps of Victoria explorers, Isabella Bird, who travelled by yak across the Digar-La in Ladakh, India; Mary Kingsley, who pioneered the route to the 13,255 summit of Mount Cameroon; and Kate Marsden, who trudged from Mowscow to Siberia in search of a cure for leprosy.

Hill-Murphy also braved piranha-infested waters in a dugout canoe to replicate the 1769 expedition of Isabel Godin, the only survivor of a 42-person, 3,000 mile expedition along the Amazon river.

Jacki says: “We are all adventuresses who need to travel to be who we are and we are better people for it.”

The talk takes place at Kilmersdon Village Hall to help raise funds for the community shop project on Friday, 20th April at 7.30 p.m.