Agatha Christie, World Traveler
During her year on the “Empire Tour,” Agatha wrote what she called a “diary” of letters to her mother. Clara kept all these letters, and when she died, Agatha reclaimed them. Later collected in a book edited by Agatha’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, these letters provide a close look at Agatha as a traveler, from what she enjoyed to what frustrated her.
Agatha wrote often, for example, of the women she encountered on the tour. One letter recounts her meeting with the “Champion lady runner” of Australia (Mrs. Baddock).
Agatha took a photo of Baddock smiling in her running outfit of bloomers and a cap just as she was about to take off in a race. Agatha also recalls the female members of the Bell family, who owned a massive farm in Queensland. “Mrs. Bell is delightful, full of character….All her children adore her….They [the girls] are all mad on horses and go about all day in shirts and breeches.”
Agatha’s letters home also detail her observations of nature along the journey, including Lake Louise, Table Mountain, Victoria Falls, and Waddamana in Tasmania. Of Waddamana, she wrote: “All Australian scenery that I have seen has a faintly austere quality, the distance is all a soft blue green—sometimes almost grey….And here and there great clumps of trees have been ringbarked and have died, and then they are ghost trees, all white, with white waving branches.”
Fans can learn about her adventures and discoveries throughout these letters: “I never knew what a banana could be,” she wrote after visiting a plantation in Honolulu. On a trip to a chocolate factory in Melbourne, she described the variety of cocoa beans from Trinidad, Ceylon, West Africa, and New Guinea. And in South Africa, New Zealand, and Honolulu, she enjoyed surfing: “Oh, the moment of complete triumph, on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!”
Ultimately, Agatha would spend much of her life abroad, and travel would be a big part of many of her novels, from Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Three Act Tragedy (1934) to Appointment with Death (1938) and A Caribbean Mystery (1964).
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The More You Know
Agatha was one of the first British women to ride a surfboard standing up. After her first attempt at surfing in South Africa, she kept at the sport, developing her skills in New Zealand and later in Honolulu, where she rode a surfboard named Fred.
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