Starting a trip to Easter Island in the footsteps of anthropologist Katherine Routledge.

A British woman is running, cycling and hitching lifts on container ships to get to the world’s most isolated island 100 years after another inspirational explorer made the same trip.

Runner Susie Stephen is retracing the route anthropologist Katherine Routledge took in 1914 to Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, an island now most widely known for being the home of giant statues.

Stephen decided to make the trip, which will take her across two oceans and the Andes Mountains, after discovering that Routledge, like her, hailed from Darlington.

She set off on the first leg of her ‘Running After Routledge’ adventure on 14 February.

She aims to run the 330 miles from Darlington to Southampton in 13 days, cross the Atlantic to Buenos Aires on a container vessel and then cycle across the Andes to Chile.

From there, will she jump on a supply boat which will take her to Rapa Nui, on Easter Island, and once there will take part in the Rapa Nui Marathon on 1 June.

You can follow her on Twitter or facebook  or her blog.

She has been a distance runner since she was 11, and is now an experienced trail and marathon runner.

As a youngster she ran for Darlington Harriers, went to the USA to run for Northern Arizona University, took up running international cross country races in Europe, and she represented Newcastle University, before spending a few years concentrating on areas of life outside of running.

She got back into running in 2008, making her debut at The London Marathon with a time of 3:03.

Katherine Routledge was one of the first female graduates of Oxford University and the first woman archaeologist to work in Polynesia.

From 1913 to 1915, Katherine and her husband, Australian adventurer William Scoresby Routledge, led the Mana Expedition to Easter Island, where Katherine conducted the first ever excavations of the island’s world-famous stone statues.

She collected vast quantities of new information, and through interviews with dozens of elderly men and women, she was able to save a history of the island, whose population was struggling back from the brink of extinction.

The general consensus is that without Katherine’s extraordinary efforts, Easter Island’s traditional beliefs and customs would have been forever lost.

As she travels Stephen will be documenting the environmental changes that have occurred since the 1914 Mana Expedition, by comparing notes on what she sees around her en route with the book ‘The Mystery of Easter Island’ Katherine Routledge wrote.

Another of the elements of this 2014 trip is to highlight the increasing difficulty of supplying fresh and clean drinking water to ever-growing human populations.

She is hoping to raise sufficient funds to finance a BioMAX unit for Rapa Nui. The increasing population of Rapa Nui has put pressure on the delivery of fresh water for the people living there, and a BioMAX unit can alleviate that.

To donate to the cause, please click here.