In 1937 Amelia Earhart disappeared off the face of the earth in what was purportedly the first attempt to fly all the way around the world.

Earhart was a glamorous 1930s personality. She became an icon of intrepid explorers, and vanguard of women who chose to pursue a different path than mother/homemaker. Around 22,000 miles into the flight, somewhere past the Nukumanu Islands near Papua New Guinea, confusing messages by Earhart came across the radio…and then nothing.

No substantiated clues have ever been found of either her body, that of her navigator’s, or the plane they were flying. Rumours that the flight was in actuality a government mission have added to the mystique.

For the past 82 years people have been searching for clues as to what happened to Earhart, and now famous explorer Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic wreck in its deep watery grave, has made it his own mission to find her plane. It will be fascinating to see what he comes up with.

We humans are fascinated by mysteries, and are driven to try and solve them, although there’s a certain romanticism in not knowing, in leaving the truth to our imaginations.

Along with legions of people, I’ve always been fascinated by the sinking of the Titanic – the tragedy, the mystery surrounding what should have been a stellar maiden voyage of a great ship, the Edwardian glamour of the ship itself. I even delivered a special two-hour evening presentation about the event for our local public library to honour the 100th anniversary. This fall my husband and I are traveling to Ireland, and I’m very much looking forward to visiting the Titanic museum in Belfast and seeing the original dry-dock site.

We love mystery so much that it became a literary genre in the 1800s when Edgar Allan Poe introduced a detective in his story Murders in the Rue Morgue. The first time my hubby and I visited England we made a beeline for the Sherlock Holmes plaque at 221b Baker Street, enjoyed the Holmes silhouette on the wall of the Baker Street tube (subway) station. We also had lunch at the atmospheric Sherlock Holmes pub in Charing Cross, where there’s also an upstairs dining room full of memorabilia. Great Britain is so associated with mystery, crime and spy novels that, to be honest, we both wore trench coats during our entire trip!

Fans of Conan Doyle’s stories were so devoted that when the author had tired of his detective hero and decided to kill him off, the public outcry was so great that Conan Doyle had to miraculously revive the character. (BBC online has a great retrospective about the influence of one of our greatest fictional detectives.)

My hubby and I are devoted to several good mystery series. We’ve watched every iteration of Sherlock Holmes, thoroughly enjoyed all the wonderful Hercule Poirot with David Suchet and many others on PBS Mystery. A couple of years ago we got into the excellent Canadian The Murdoch Mysteries, as well as Miss Fisher from Australia, the Brokenwood Mysteries from New Zealand, and Death in Paradise.

We have, of course, watched almost every Agatha Christie story ever produced. I was really tickled when an episode of Dr. Who revolved around the real-life mystery of Agatha Christie’s own ten-day disappearance in 1926.

The entertaining 1978 movie version of Death on the Nile, with one of the best ensemble casts I’ve ever seen and amazing cinematography, inspired me to fulfill a lifelong dream to go to Egypt, and is still one of my all-time favourite movies.

I have the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories in print, which I love for their period atmosphere, and for the same reason my absolute favourite mystery series is the Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers, set in the 1930s.

Why do we love mysteries so much? It’s not just humans who relish them, either – dogs, for example, are universally curious about everything. When our two dogs were still alive, our male’s favourite game was to play hide-and-seek with me: I would hide myself somewhere in the house and call his name in a particular tone of voice, and he would delightedly spend the next few minutes trying to find me. It’s one of the things I miss the most since our dogs got old and moved on to their well-deserved doggie heaven.

There’s a great article on the Psychologies website about why we all love mystery, and why it’s important in our lives. It shares the story of an artist, John Newling, who went so far as to ask British insurance company Lloyd’s of London in 2006 to insure him against ‘loss of mystery’. His comment was “Mystery is a predisposition to search, enjoy, play and wonder”. I think that’s a great summation of the appeal of mystery in our lives, and I can empathize with his feelings that mystery is disappearing is our increasingly structured world.

I would have loved to be an explorer in the 1800s to early 1900s, when most of the world was still a mystery. The search for Amelia Earhart reminds me of one of the greatest searches ever undertaken, to find out whether the great explorer and missionary David Livingstone was still alive. He had travelled to Africa in 1865 to search for the source of the Nile, one of the greatest geographical questions in history, and hadn’t been heard from in several years when the New York Herald newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley off to try and find him.

The sense of mystery and not knowing what might lie around the next corner is a critical part of adventure travel. Even though most of the world has been charted by now, for all of us modern adventurers there’s still our own personal exploration of something yet to be seen.

True adventure travel is never planned to be perfect or completely structured – there should always be a certain amount of uncertainty, and some opportunity for off-the-cuff exploration.

The adventure is in the mystery of what you’ll discover about a new place, a new culture, and about yourself in the process.

Some of the best experiences my hubby and I have had have occurred when a journey has derailed a bit, or something not on the original itinerary came up and we ran with it.

We had a hilarious camel ride through the Sahara in Egypt, as well as a visit to an authentic camel market where our group’s arrival stopped everything in its tracks. Once the local traders had recovered, however, one man eyed me for a bit and then offered my hubby 1,000 camels for me, which at about $1500 per camel amounted to a considerable sum of money. My hubby joked that if he thought the fellow actually had that much, I might have remained in Egypt. Like Queen Victoria, I was not amused.

If you’re interested in being a true modern adventurer, follow this blog for ongoing information and inspiration, and for news about my upcoming Adventure Travel 101 online course, currently in development.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear what your favourite mysteries are, whether novels, television/movies, or real-life!