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[float=left][/float] What possessed three 1950s housewives to defy convention and set off together for the forbidden reaches of the Himalayas? And what did they find when they got there? Sally Williams talks to the women today

Fifty years ago three English housewives set off on a remarkable adventure. Anne Davies, 35, Eve Sims, 25, and Antonia Deacock, 26, who had no previous experience of overland expeditions, embarked on a journey everyone said could not be done by women: a 16,000-mile drive to India and back, and a 300-mile trek on foot into Zanskar, the remote Tibetan Buddhist kingdom.

They were the first European women to venture into Zanskar, where foreigners were forbidden to travel for political reasons. Probably the first European women to cross Afghanistan unescorted, they even climbed a virgin peak and named it Biri Giri (Wives' Peak). Yet the trip was the antithesis of professional exploration today. The women packed plimsolls, umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun, and skipping-ropes to maintain fitness. They dressed in their husbands' long johns, drank pints of Brooke Bond tea (Eve, by mistake, ordered enough 'to keep a family going for 150 years'), and insisted their two Ladakhi guides have jam as part of a proper balanced diet. Moreover, at the planning stage, neither Sims nor Deacock could drive. (Both passed their tests just before departure.)

On 5 May 1958 the three women climbed into their long-wheelbase Land-Rover in London, and drove through ten countries in six weeks, then walked for 21 days to Padam, the capital of Zanskar, in the highest inhabited region in the world.

The women were subjected to great scrutiny. So were their zips. 'They had never seen such a thing,' wrote Antonia Deacock in No Purdah in Padam, her 1960 book about the expedition. 'They pulled them to and fro, hissing amazement.'

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Telegraph TV: watch Anne, Eve and Antonia's film of the Himalayas