Harpeet Atwal

“Love you mate,” I said as I put the phone down. Suddenly a rush of warmth flew through my veins and spread all over my body. I needed to let him know that I had his back. That it was all going to be ok. He needed to hear that he was loved. And I needed to tell him. I think it’s odd with blokes. We are scared of the word “love”. I’m lucky to be comfortable with it now. I heard it a lot from my mum growing up. But I didn’t hear it at all from the men in my life. And almost never from my stepdad.

Uncultivated, uninhabited and undisturbed by man… There’s always been something magnetically appealing about wilderness. Whether it’s dense forests and thundering waterfalls or barren moors and blustery mountaintops, the human psyche seems irresistibly drawn to unadulterated emptiness. The Japanese have a word for this allure: ma. The raw beauty of nothingness; the irresistible space between the edges; the precious gaps or pauses between places, creating necessary balance.

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the world’s most inspiring female adventurers for Flash Pack’s Female SOLOists series – a monthly column dedicated to women exploring the world their own way. When we started, the intention of this series was to disrupt the conventional image of what a ‘real’ adventurer was.