90 The Economist June 11th 2022
Obituary Dervla Murphy
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gling up a steep hill near Lismore in County Waterford on her
secondhand bike, when she looked down at her thin legs slowly
pumping and thought that if they just went on doing so, she could
get to India. On the same birthday when she had got the bike she
had also been given a secondhand atlas, so the route was in her
head already. Nothing stood in her way at all except two little tiny
stretches of water and a mountain range or three.
So began a dream of travelling that eventually led to a trek of
4,500 miles from Ireland to Delhi, a journey of 1,300 miles through
the Peruvian Andes and trips to southern Africa, Madagascar, Cu
ba and the Middle East. She kept copious diaries, often written by
oillamp or moonlight as she prepared to slide her sore bones into
yet another fleabag or a charpoy in the open air, and the diaries
grew into 26 books which earned her the title, daft she thought, of
an Irish national treasure.
Her preferred conveyance for most of these trips was an Arm
strong Cadet man’s bike, bought in 1961 and christened Roz, short
for Don Quixote’s steed Rocinante. Roz was fitted out with two
pannierbagholders that could carry 28lb of kit, including the vi
tal notebooks, a good deal of aspirin, William Blake’s poems, a
stock of American cigarettes and an emergency supply of Courvoi
sier. Her whole temperament was steady, reconciled to being
pushed through deep sand, heaved up cliff faces and near
drowned in raging rivers, as her owner was. If Roz could not man
age it had to be Dervla’s poor feet, or a pony, or a mule (in Ethiopia),
or the buses that bounced violently and sickeningly over one atro
cious track after another. Once in the Himalayas she even boarded
a small Dakota, but hated herself for making use of this noisy me
chanised impertinence. It was an insult to the mountains.
Generally, too, she travelled alone. Why shouldn’t a woman go
where she pleased, embracing an unplanned life? She did not startthe long treks until she was 31, having to stay at home before then
to care for her disabled mother and ageing father. By that time she
certainly knew her own mind, batty and stubborn and fiercely in
dependent. (Even her daughter Rachel, whom she sometimes took
roaming with her later, had been conceived with no intention of
ever marrying.) When Responsible Persons gave her Good Advice,
such as telling her it was folly to cross Afghanistan on a bike, she
was all the more perversely determined to go. Mind you, she car
ried a .25 pistol in the pocket of her slacks and used it too, dis
patching a wolf that flung itself at her and seeing off a lecherous
sixfoot Kurd, to her great satisfaction and surprise.
Many who met her in the world’s wilder and less visited places
assumed, in fact, that she was a man. She was tall, deepvoiced and
wellmuscled, and in extremis, as when fording a river in Pakistan,
could carry Roz round her neck. She could also drink like a man,
beer being her staple, and preferred to do her research (though
that was too solemn a name for it), in bars, pubs and teahouses or
at village gatherings, where locals crowded curiously round her.
Those were the people she wanted to mix with, ordinary folk,
sharing their joy at bloodily fought polo matches or letting tod
dlers ride round on her back while she brayed like a donkey. To
them she would patiently show, time after time, how a bicycle
worked, and with them she would sit down fairly gratefully to
meals of stewed clover, flyblown bread and rancid ghee, amazed
by how freely they shared the little they had.
The more remote the place, the more she was drawn there. To
look out on thousands of miles of uninhabited land, from the top
of a mountain she could possibly freewheel down, was sheer bliss.
Her greatest happiness often lay in harshness, such as the vast ice
of Siberia, the dazzlingly tinted ranges of the Hindu Kush—like
light immobilised—or the crenellated peak in the Andes through
which the sun woke her one morning as it rose. Yet human incur
sions also delighted her, in gardens full of roses and pomegran
ates, orchards misted with apricot and apple blossom and fields
where women worked decked out in crimson and silver. Her spe
cial love was for Afghanistan, not then convulsed by war and not
yet touched by the creeping blight of Modernity, Uniformity and
socalled Progress. She felt she might have stayed for ever in the
Hindu Kush, living in the sanity of backwardness.
Dislike of Western ways permeated “Full Tilt”, her first and
most famous book, which told of her dreamtrip to India. But the
exploits to which she subjected both Roz and her own unfortunate
carcass disguised the true strength of her political feelings. Gradu
ally she showed them more. For subsequent books she lived in
squalid, diseaseridden camps among refugees from Tibet and
Palestine, becoming a campaigner for them, and travelled among
victims of aidsand genocide in Africa. For “A Place Apart” she took
Roz to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, talking to people on
both sides in an effort to understand Irish nationalism, for which
her father had been imprisoned. Her happiest spell of research
was also close to home, for “Tales from Two Cities”, a study of race
relations on the outskirts of Birmingham and Bradford. Both trips
were mostly pubwork, and reinforced the major conclusion she
had reached already—that wherever you went in this fractious
world, people were essentially the same and had to be treated with
simple (socialist) fairness.
In old age, living in a chilly warren of stone buildings in Lis
more surrounded by books, cats and forgetmenots and subsist
ing mostly on beer, her regrets were few. But they were heartfelt.
She wished she had visited Tibet before the Chinese took over, and
she wished that remote places might be allowed to stay that way.
Mass Tourism, Motor Roads, Expanding Markets, Capitalism it
self, were all neat hell to her. Each mobile phone announced the
end of a sealed and precious culture.
Travel was done now, and arthritis made it hard to write. But
she was happy enough just to watch the leaves moving in the
wind, excited, preparing to spin abroad. nHave bike, will travelDervla Murphy, Ireland’s best-loved travel writer, died on
May 22nd, aged 90