Ellen Bassani has led a life of adventure that would terrify most people. But what makes the mother-of-two even more remarkable is that she has done it all without her sight.

Cycling across Costa Rica, white water rafting, even climbing unaided up the 139-feet mast of a ship — all would be challenging for the sighted person, and Ellen has done them all, literally, in the dark.

But as Ellen will tell you herself, these feats were really just “therapy” for the real challenges in her life — growing up with parents who denied she even had a sight problem and struggling to fit in and look “normal” in a world in which she felt she had no place.

Relaxing at home in Oxford after a busy day of Nordic walking and writing her memoirs, Ellen says it was only when she celebrated her 60th birthday a few weeks ago that she realised she was finally at peace with her blindness.

“Looking back I have lived most of my life in fear,” she said.

“But it has taken me this long — and a lot of hard lessons — to realise that most of the fears we have as humans are just our imagination and are a waste of time.”

Ellen was born in Australia, with severe visual problems, to parents who tried to deny she even had a sight problem.

She was then sent to the local convent school and didn’t tell any of the teachers she was blind. Neither did her parents.

She remembers: “I hid it very well. It took them nine months to notice and they let me stay on after that.”

It wasn't until she was 13 that an eye specialist took her parents aside and said she needed a special school to help her come to terms with her condition. She learned Braille in six weeks, and managed to get a scholarship to university.

She said: “When I was growing up, I never thought I had a place in the world.

“Living in Australia, a pioneering country, you were either fit to work, or you weren’t. I remember an aunt asking my mum why they were bothering to educate me.

“Thankfully my parents did, but I still felt I was going through the motions of being alive for the early part of my life. Or pretending to be brave, but in retrospect I know I wasn’t pretending — I am brave.”

But Ellen’s bravery sometimes put her in danger.

“As I went into my late teens and started mixing with other young people my daring streak appeared,” she explained.

“I decided to go to Japan with my friends. I felt so alive there that when we all came back I decided to go again — alone.

“I had to put complete trust in others and although I did travel about, I didn’t feel like I was adventuring as such, I was surviving — testing myself, literally forcing myself into difficult situations and when I look back, I was pretty careless with my life at that point.

“I would cross roads without a white stick and I suspect I was just trying to prove to myself that I was worth something.”

At 19, she went to Canberra to work as a social worker and a group of her friends decided to go trekking in Nepal.

“I said I wanted to go, but they were dubious about whether I would cope with the rough terrain and told me to go and speak to an expert to see if he thought I could manage it.

“I lied and said he thought I could manage, but within a half hour of getting there I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.

“I suppose because I had been raised as someone who was sighted, I had the expectations of someone who was sighted.

“But in this case I learned a terrible life lesson. It became apparent straight away that I would have to go back to base camp and there I waited for my friends for five days, unable to really move around because of the dangerous terrain and unable to understand the language around me. I felt terrified.

“When it was time to travel back down the mountain with my guide I remember thinking, ‘This has to stop, this fear can kill me. I just have to go on not searching for thrills, but just accepting what comes to me’.”

More successful ‘adventures’ included life modelling.

She said: “I’d once asked my mother if I was pretty and she said I had nice ears, which devastated me.

“Being a nude model wasn’t salacious in any way, it felt liberating knowing that people were appreciating my body in an artistic way.”

Ellen moved to England because this country was better equipped.

“You have footpaths, great radio and zebra crossings,” she laughed.

She later married — she is now divorced — and had two children, a son Alex, now 24 and Charlotte, 21.

And in her 40s and 50s she attempted even more challenges.

“It was 2001 and I was 51 when I rode across Costa Rica on the back of a tandem for Mencap. It rained all the way, but I loved it. Even when the bike broke and I fell off!

“While we were there I also got the chance to go white water rafting and apparently a picture taken of it shows all the other people in the boat looking terrified and me just beaming with delight.

“You see, I don’t have the expectations that being able to see can give you sometimes. I just get the sensations and they can be thrilling.”

But climbing the mast of the aptly-named ship Tenacious was more terrifying than thrilling. She explained: “The Jubilee Sailing Trust enables people with disabilities to crew alongside able-bodied sailors.

“When we got on board I asked if anyone with a visual impairment had climbed the mast before and they said ‘one’, so I said I’d like to do it. I actually started to think it was a bad idea after a while and hoped the bosun would forget, but he didn’t!

“It was one of the most terrifying things I had ever done. I climbed the rigging in stages but soon became aware that the rigging was running out and had turned into an ever-decreasing ladder.

“I got within eight feet of the crows’ nest when I became so tired and realised that I was really in danger of falling. I felt such a failure, but a young deaf lad climbed up the starboard ladder and just held my hand for a while.

“It was symbolic. At that point I was 53 and I suppose I realised I had nothing to prove anymore.”

While her exploits may have calmed down a little, Ellen still ‘wears a variety of hats’.

She said: “I was asked to go to China by the China Vision charity and train visually impaired journalists there in putting together TV and radio programmes. We did this, and as a result, Chinese people, many of whom were being forgotten by society, are now getting programmes which encourage them to meet their full potential.”

When she isn’t travelling, she enjoys Nordic walking (in which she uses white sticks as poles).

And she also enjoys public speaking about her experiences.

The only sadness in her life was the recent death of her beloved guide dog, Scottie.

“He had been beside me for 14 years, 12 of them working. But he was terribly poorly and the decision to have him put down was absolutely heartbreaking.

“He was the first entity who made me feel it wasn’t just me facing the world.”