9A story of extraordinary danger and adventure as a very young woman attempts, alone, a trip across Papua New Guinea. After her first taste of the freedom found in travel at age 19, Kira Salak spent the next several years of her youth as a constant, impulsive traveler. Barely old enough to drink, she leaves her life behind - graduate school, a job, a boyfriend who loves her - to attempt the impossible, her dream of following in the footsteps of British explorer Ivan Champion, the first person to successfully cross the island of Papua New Guinea in 1927. She is motivated by something much deeper than simply wanting to be the first woman to make such a crossing, and as she composes this memoir she still searches for answers. Why would a lone traveler, a very young woman at that, want to embark on such a dangerous and mysterious trip? Where was her fear? Or was this all an attempt to court and indulge her fear for some larger purpose? No one, on the road or at home, could quite understand