Showing results for "dervla murphy"

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Dervla Murphy

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily 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 alar...

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Dervla Murphy

After her epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile - but she also managed to explore India's Tibetan frontier, leaving the reader panting in her wake. Alongside her enchantment, Dervla became a perceptive ...

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Dervla Murphy

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Derv...

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Dervla Murphy

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enj...

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Dervla Murphy

Shortly after the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dervla Murphy travelled to Romania and found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered by revolution. Eager to explore a country that had hitherto been inaccessible to outsiders, Murphy describes in lucid detail a journey on two planes: cycling and ambling through the rural Carpathians, and exploring the mind-set of a post-Communist society in the grips of an identity crisis. She is treated to tremendous hospitality wherever she goes, and in...

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Dervla Murphy

With her fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel, Dervla Murphy journeyed across the unique island of Madagascar, neither part of Africa, its nearest neighbour, nor part of Asia, the ancestral home the Malagasy people who live there. Beginning at Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital, they travelled south by foot, bus and truck through the Ankaratra Mountains, marvelling at lemurs in the Isoala Massif, exploring the great rain forests of the Betsimisaraka tribesmen and living briefly with the Vezo ...

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Dervla Murphy

Inspired by childhood stories of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, in 1966 Dervla Murphy bought Jock, an amiable pack-mule, and set off to trek across the highlands of this awesome but troubled land. She wandered south from the Red Sea shore to Sheba's Aksum and up onto the icy roof of Africa, the Semien mountains. From there she descended to the ruined palaces of Gondar and skirted the northern shore of Lake Tana before crossing the drought-afflicted high ranges to Lalibela. Having exc...

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Dervla Murphy

At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. She also sought to interrogate her own opinions and emotions. As an Irishwoman and traveller who had only ever spent thirty-six hours of her forty-four years over the border to the north, why had she been so reluctant to engage with the issues? Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by s...

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Dervla Murphy

The Waiting Land is an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman in the spring of 1965. The third in a series of books tracing Dervla's involvement with the self-sufficient mountain cultures of the Himalayas, she is lured by the chance to work again with Tibetan refugees - this time a group of five hundred lodged in tents in the remote Pokhara valley. Once established in Kathmandu, and later at home in a tiny, vermin-infested room above a stall in a Nepalese baza...

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Dervla Murphy

As Dervla Murphy crisscrossed the Balkans in a series of bicycle journeys towards the beginning and end of the 1990s, she recorded the griefs and confusions of the ordinary people, many of whom had showed extraordinary courage and resilience during that terrible 'decade of decay' and whose voices were so little heard during the conflict. Despite their suffering, she found plenty of traditional Balkan hospitality and was passed between friends from city to city and town to town. Through the...

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Dervla Murphy

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the g...

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Dervla Murphy

Accompanied by her daughter Rachel and a loveable horse named Egbert, Dervla Murphy journeys across Cameroon, discovering a land of astonishing natural beauty and friendliness. Dervla and Rachel are frequently mistaken by the locals for husband and wife during their time in the country, leading on one occasion to Dervla exposing her chest as proof of her femininity. They are, by turns arrested, drenched by tropical storms and burnt by the hot African sun. Yet at the heart of this account i...