Elizabeth Sleith recalls the incredible life story of Aloha Wanderwell whose wanderlust took her around the world in the 1900s One-hundred-and-ten years ago this week, on October 13 1906, a girl was born in Winnipeg, Canada.She was christened Idris Galcia Hall but it was by her stage name, Aloha Wanderwell, that she would become known in the 1920s and '30s as the "world's most widely travelled girl" and "the first woman to drive around the world in an automobile".Strange that, today, her name is barely remembered. In her day, she was an adventurer, a feminist and a pioneer who ventured into strange lands, made contact with unknown tribes and gave lectures the world over about her travels.Her adventure begins in the early 1900s with a Pole named Valerian Johannes Piecynski, an inventor and explorer who, in 1919, changed his name to Captain Walter Wanderwell while on a walking expedition in the US.After World War 1, he wanted to restore the broken ties between nations by visiting every country in the world and to record his experiences for educational purposes in writing and on film.With the support of industrialist Henry Ford, who donated two modified Model Ts for the mission, Wanderwell set out from Detroit in 1921 and sailed to London for the European leg of his mission.When he arrived in Paris, Idris Hall was a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose father had died at Ypres, and who was attending school in Paris but who, by all accounts, showed little interest in her studies.In her memoir, Call to Action, published in 1939, she says that, even then, she "ached for action".How she ended up a Wanderwell is a matter of dispute. Some accounts say she'd spotted an ad in the Paris Herald - "Brains, Beauty & Breeches - World Tour Offer For Lucky Young Woman...Wanted to join an expedition...Asia, Africa."Others say she had read about Wanderwell and, when he arrived in Paris, made it her mission to meet him.Either way, when the expedition left Paris in 1922, it had acquired a new member and Hall had acquired a new name: Aloha Wanderwell, bequeathed to her by "the Cap", though it was only three years later that they would marry.She later described the start of her adventure in her books thus: "The whole world was out there. I reaching for it, the world reaching for me - ecstasy - the ravishing thrill."She started out as his secretary. Being fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, and with some Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, she was soon the driver of the second Ford, nicknamed Little Lizzie, as well as cinematographer, photographer, translator, and writer, composing vivid descriptions of parts of the world that had not yet been documented.story_article_left1As the Wanderwells toured with an early motion-picture camera, their films captured the first glimpses of the cultures, people and landmarks of five continents from the early 1920s.Her footage of the Bororos tribe in Brazil, with whom she spent some months and which is now owned by the Smithsonian, was the first ever captured.The team funded their travels entirely on the road, by selling pamphlets, giving talks, and charging for screenings of their footage in the cities they visited.In the end, they covered 43 countries and four continents - Europe, the Middle East, India, Japan, China, the Soviet Union, the US, Cuba and Africa.In a time when a young woman's travelling alone anywhere was a cause for scandal, Wanderwell camped at the foot of the Sphinx in Egypt, saw food riots in Berlin after the end of WW1, and disguised herself as a man to pray at Mecca.From 1926-1928, she drove from Cape Town to Cairo and - somewhere between all this adventuring - the pair had two children, Nile and Valri.Their story, however, has a chilling end. In 1932, Walter Wanderwell was shot dead on board their yacht, the Carma, in Long Beach harbour in the US, the day before they were to embark on another expedition. His wife was not on board at the time but her whereabouts sparked a frenzy of speculation in the press. To this day, the murder remains unsolved.Aloha went on to marry a cameraman who had worked on the expedition, called Walter Baker, and continued to travel, lecture and make films well into her old age. She died in California in 1996.Another poignant footnote is what happened to the car. In 1929, Wanderwell presented Little Lizzie to Ford for display in his museum in Dearborn, near Detroit.In 1979, she wrote to the museum to ask after her old companion and was told Ford had decided it was of "marginal historical importance". It was scrapped in 1942 for its metal content "as part of the war effort".Wanderwell wrote back, calling the scrapping an ironical waste and lamenting that "I can never have the satisfaction of seeing again the object that had dominated the very best years of my life"...