Muristek
Travel writer who famously journeyed alone from her native Ireland to India on a bicycle, armed with a pistol and a compass
Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle, published in 1965, is now as much a historical document of a gone world as a travel book, but its feeling of release, cycling towards a wide future while running away from a confined past, still exhilarates. Like notable 19th-century women travellers such as Isabella Bird Bishop, when at last released from a cage of domestic duty Murphy travelled, riding through the cold, snowy winter of 1962-63.
She went armed with a .25 pistol and basic instruction from the County Waterford gardai on how to use it, which she did to confront wolves and thieves, and also with the maps and compass through which she had explored the planet in her imagination since childhood. Most of all she had a tolerance for hardship (her total budget was £64) and a curiosity about everyday elsewheres, which she kept through half a century of advancing by bike, foot, mule and cart (she never drove a car) on and off road across four continents.
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