Full Tilt

18.00

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India.

A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantites, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.

Still admired now for travelling in much the same style in her late seventies, it is a pleasure to encounter the young Dervla just setting out on her travelling life.

2 in stock