Female Adventurer... (1)

.                                                  .."Dervla Murphy"..

Dervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. At teenage, she used to nurse her mother and she did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. After her mother's death, she was free to complete her adventures.

Some of her famous books:

1- FULL TILT: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

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 occurence 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.(DervlaMurphy.com )

2- THE WAITING LAND: A Spell in Nepal

In The Waiting Land seasoned travel writer Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal’s different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country’s natural grandeur and beauty. With her special brand of Irish understatement, she delights in the unpredictability of her journey and in the surprises which make her travels in that unique country such a stirring experience. Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy’s charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.(goodreads.com)

3- A PLACE APART

A Place Apart is a quite remarkable geographical and psychological travelogue that rises phoenix-like above history, politics, theology and economics.


It is an extraordinarily successful attempt to present Northern Ireland from the inside out, with honesty, sympathy and understand.( TLS)

4- TIBETAN FOOTHOLD

In July 1963 Dervla Murphy arrived in a sweltering Delhi by bicycle. Deciding that the heat precluded further cycling until November, she worked in Tibetan refugee camps in Northern India. Using extracts from the diaries she kept at the time, Dervla describes the day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources. Quickly falling in love with the "Tiblets" - cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children - she pitches in with a helping hand wherever it is needed (just about everywhere), and even finds time to meet the Dalai Lama and his entourage (amazon.com)