the times | Wednesday May 25 2022 51
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On her tenth birthday, in receipt of an
atlas and a bicycle, Dervla Murphy con-
ceived a plan to cycle from her home in
Ireland to India. More than two
decades later, by then in her thirties and
after the death of her parents, she set
off.
The six-month journey, which she
made on her bicycle named Roz, took
her from deepest winter in northern
France, across communist eastern
Europe and the wilds of Iran and
Afghanistan to monsoon-drenched
India — and it established her as an ad-
venturer in the days long before the
“hippy trail” had been worn. The result-
ing book based on her diaries, Full Tilt:
Ireland to India with a Bicycle, made her
name as a new breed of professional
travel writer, one who was loved for her
lack of self-regard and unsentimental
frankness as much as for her daring.
She was to make a career of seeking
out remote and untouched corners of
the earth, shunning western comforts
and companionship, and chronicling
how she found them in two dozen
books written in refreshingly unembel-
lished prose.
Yet if she was straightforward in her
writing, in person she could be quite
enigmatic and prickly. One publisher
compared the experience of getting in-
formation out of her to “trying to open
an oyster with a wet bus ticket”.
She always refused advances from
her publishers so she could remain in-
dependent, and she made her first trip
on a tight budget, spending only £65.
She carried little with her beyond the
essential “flea bag”. Asked if she used a
camp bed, she would laugh, “Good lord
no, the decadence!”
Having taken the precaution of post-
ing ahead several spare tyres to embas-
sies en route, Murphy set off for India in
1963 equipped with a .25 pistol, which
she had learnt to fire in the mountains
around Lismore. Within the first month
she shot at a pack of wolves as they tore
at her clothes after she became strand-
ed in a snow drift and scared off a large,
skimpily clad man who she found
climbing into her bed one night in Iran.
While Murphy took pleasure in de-
scribing the landscapes she passed
through, it was the details of the disas-
ters and difficulties she encountered
that made for addictive reading. She
battled treacherous black ice in the
mountains of eastern Europe, winds
that blew her off her bike and debilitat-
ing dust storms in Pakistan. She was
nothing if not resourceful. On the
freezing Babusar Pass in Pakistan she
was forced to tie herself to a cow to get
across a raging nullah. She had entan-
glements with bureaucratic border
posts and embassies, among them the
Afghan embassy in Iran, which initially
refused to issue her with a visa to their
country — a lone Swedish woman who
had recently passed through had been
set upon and cut to pieces, it said. She
later had her ribs cracked by the butt of
a gun during a fracas between a group
of Afghan men on a bus, causing her
much pain for several weeks.
However, Murphy was unfazed by
events that might have forced a lesser
traveller to turn for home. She had a
natural gift for friendship, even in ap-
parently hostile places. “Most people in
the world are helpful and trustworthy,”
Pass, stayed with several friendly Pash-
tuns (many of whom she noted carried
as much ammunition as they could
possibly string across their bodies) and
escaped the baking heat of Rawalpindi,
where she survived on lumps of salt, for
the vast, snow-capped mountains of
the Gilgit region. Murphy embraced
most customs she encountered and, on
discovering that the stream used by a
raja’s household as a latrine was also
where they gathered their water, wrote
only that she hoped they collected it
upstream.
After a much-needed haircut, Mur-
phy descended down into the Punjab,
arriving in Delhi on July 18, 1963. She
estimated she had covered about 3,000
miles, cycling an average of 70 to 80
miles a day.
Dervla Murphy was born into a Re-
publican family of modest means in Lis-
more, Co Waterford, in 1931. Her father,
who had spent time at the Sorbonne,
was a librarian for Waterford County;
her mother was invalided by arthritis
when Murphy was a baby.
Murphy’s formal convent education
came to an end when she was 14. A
shortage of servants had deprived her
father of a housekeeper and her mother
of a nurse. She cared for her parents,
with whom she developed close and
complicated relationships, for the next
16 years. It was a period she later re-
called as a blur in which she often
smoked and drank heavily. She read
widely and escaped from the confines
of the house on long bicycle rides.
After her mother’s death, Murphy
embraced her new independence and
was determined to remain unfettered.she concluded and was deeply critical
of mass tourism and later floods of trav-
ellers through Asia who rarely did
more than take pictures of those they
met. She was never deterred by lan-
guage barriers and relished being invit-
ed into the homes of Bulgarian factory
workers, Afghan villagers and retired
Pakistani military officers. In the mul-
lah-dominated country of the Great
Salt Desert in Iran she found herself
stoned by youths one day but followed
by adoring schoolboys clutching copies
of Jane Eyre the next.She was disdainful of modern, west-
ern consumerism and its effects, from
which she constantly craved escape,
notably in Afghanistan. She admired
the rugged yet beautiful Afghan land-
scape and the strong and intelligent na-
ture of the people.
She soon adapted to the bus timeta-
bles there: vehicles departed a town on-
ly when enough cargo had arrived
(which could take all day, sometimes
several). At Bamian, in central Afghan-
istan, she was awed by the ancient Bud-
dhas carved in to the rock face of the
valley (later to be destroyed by the Tali-
ban). But was depressed by growing
signs of Russian and American infra-
structure projects, as the two powers
tussled for influence in the region.
In Pakistan she crossed over the
grave-strewn, battle-scarred KhyberThe difficulties that
she encountered made
for addictive reading
Murphy in 1990. She wrote more than 20 books in a voice of unembellished honestyShe always
insisted
that she never wanted to marry. Over
the next half a century she journeyed
from Ethiopia to Peru to Cuba and,
after the success of Full Tilt, wrote more
than 20 travel books.
After her arrival in India in 1963 she
found a job living and working with Ti-
betan refugee children in Dharamsala,
an Indian hill station. Here, she toiled
with a team of western and Indian staff
to feed and bathe the children, dishing
out medicine and battling against the
rampant spread of scabies.
She had already written four books
when, in 1968, she gave birth to her
daughter Rachel. The child was the re-
sult of an affair with Terence de Vere
White, literary editor of the Irish Times.
She felt that it would not be fair to re-
move a baby straight to Asia and so con-
tented herself by writing for several
years for the Irish Times. Soon after
Rachel turned five, however, Murphy
took her to India.
Mother and daughter spent six
months in the south before a winter
travelling through the remote, icy pass-
es of Baltistan, beneath K2 high in the
Karakoram range. Murphy bought a re-
tired polo pony, Hallam, on which Ra-
chel rode, along with bundles of camp-
ing gear and their supplies. The pair
made arduous journeys from village to
village, surviving on the occasional lux-
ury of boiled eggs but more often on
handfuls of dried apricots, and dossed
down on the floors of flea-infested
guesthouses. “Children pay little atten-
tion to racial or cultural differences,”
she wrote. “[They] rapidly demolishbarriers of shyness or apprehension of-
ten raised when foreigners unexpect-
edly approach a remote village.” Tooth-
ache, avalanches, bursts of hostility and
weather so bitter that they did not re-
move their clothes for three months
were among the horrors she described
in her books.
Her accounts of her journeys around
the rest of the world were well-received.
In 1966, Murphy had switched conti-
nents and travelled through Ethiopia
with a pack-mule. In 1983 she again
took Rachel on a 1,300-mile trek from
Cajamarca to Cuzco, the ancient Inca
capital in Peru, at one point losing their
mule over a precipice. Two years later
she was in Madagascar, surviving both
gout and hepatitis. Cameroon followed
with a teenage Rachel.
In the early 1990s she took to her bike
to explore rural Transylvania after the
fall of the Ceausescu dictator-
ship in Romania and later ped-
alled across the Limpopo prov-
ince to gauge South Africa’s
changing social conditions. Her
travelling was ceaseless and in
her late seventies, accompanied
by her daughter and three
granddaughters, she continued
to seek out new physically or po-
litically isolated places including
Cuba.
As her daughter was growing
up, Murphy wrote about political
topics closer to home, including
an account of her own child-
hood, Wheels within Wheels: The
Makings of a Traveller.
The diaries that she published
from her trips were as she wrote
them on route — “If rats are
crawling all over me I keep it
short,” she would say — or taken
from the daily missives which she post-
ed home to friends from around the
world. Narrated chronologically, the
books were largely unembellished with
research in an encyclopaedia on her
return and possessed an attractive hon-
esty. Murphy did not claim to know
more about the politics and history of a
country than what she had picked up
on her travels, which was often a great
deal. She emphasised small, practical
details, a trait which occasionally irri-
tated critics.
With red cheeks and a strong Irish
voice, Murphy had a weakness for Café
Crème cigars and beer and, to some, cut
an eccentric figure. She kept her hair
short, and travelling through the small
villages of Persia in the 1960s, staying in
impregnable mud fortresses, it was of-
ten assumed that she was a man.
She kept a rambling house in County
Waterford with no television, central
heating or washing machine, but
several dogs. She entertained friends
and family there regularly but they
were required to be hardy. The bath was
the river.
When asked in one interview why
she continued to travel, Murphy con-
cluded: “I was born that way. I need to
get away from the artificial life of the
West. When I set out on a journey, my
spirits rise. I’m never lonely or fright-
ened.”Dervla Murphy, traveller and author, was
born on November 28, 1931. She died on
May 22, 2022, aged 90erwantedtomarryOvers
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page 52Obituaries
Dervla Murphy
Intrepid and prolific Irish travel writer who carried a pistol, fought off wolves and chronicled her bike trip from Ireland to India
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