Dervla Murphy, now 87, looks back on her life of adventure and travel and she says that the key to travel is to “embrace the unpredictable.” Murphy certainly has done that. She has traveled through three continents some of them with her daughter (when her daughter was 5!). She has written 26 travel books, and she has lived life as she wants to, not bowing to the modern world. She still lives in the same town she grew up in, Lismore, in Co.Waterford, Ireland, and she has no smartphone or television. She plays records (remember those?) and reads for entertainment.

From an early age, she knew EXACTLY what she wanted to do. At age 10 she stated:

“I wanted to wander alone, taking each day as it came.”

For her 10th birthday, she received a bicycle as a gift and made a resolution to cycle to England. She later changed that resolution, saying she wanted to bicycle to India.

Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveler is the story of her life before her first bicycle journey. Dervla grew up an only child with an invalid mother and a father who was a librarian. She was in and out of school because she needed to care for her mother, who grew increasingly difficult and demanding as she grew older. Dervla’s loves were her books and her bicycle. In the home of her paternal grandparents, she found solace in the stacks of books. At 6 1/2 she had already decided

“the world was full of books and I intended to read as many as possible before I died.”

Finally, at 31, after the death of her parents, she was able to begin her first journey – traveling by bicycle from Ireland to India. (In case you were wondering how that would be possible, she started from Dunkirk, in France.) The journey is recorded in Full Tilt, her first published book.

I loved this book! Dervla’s energy, her love of people, and her resiliency are contagious. She wasn’t afraid to meet people and make friends (although she did carry a pistol with her), staying with provincial governors and wealthy friends, but also the poorest of the poor, in their (sometimes flea-ridden) hovels (once in a bed with several dirty children) and eating the most ghastly, dirty, food with them. She started in January 1963 and traveled through Eastern Europe, Turkey, then Persia (Iran), Afghanistan, and Pakistan, ending up in Delhi, India in November.

Dervla’s bike, called Roz (after Rocinante, Don Quixote’s steed) had many problems. She seemed always to be dealing with punctures, brake problems, and various other issues. She took to leaving spare tires in strategic locations and having to wait hours or days for a ride. At one point a truck she was in broke down and she had to spend the night sleeping on tires waiting for help.

She did use her pistol twice. The first time she had to fight off some starving wolves in a dark Yugoslavian forest, one hanging off her shoulder and the other with a grip on her ankle. She admitted to being terrified but also thinking that the idea of being devoured by wolves was “faintly comical.” The second time she awoke to find an unwelcome male Kurd on top her. She fired into the air and he quickly left.

She traveled light, saying “the further you travel the less you find you need.” At one point, she was down to two pens, writing-paper, Blake’s poems (!), map, passport, nylon shirt,” with room for food.

Her attitude to everything was “what’s the fuss about?” For example, she said the Afghani people had no concept of time; a bus scheduled to leave at 8 a.m. might leave sometime in the afternoon. She said, “Personally I find all of this most endearing after a lifetime of being tyrannized by the clock.” When she lost some money, she commented that someone else must have needed it more than she did. 

People and Places

Dervla had definite opinions about the people she met, but in general, she loved them – and they loved her too. The word would go out to a town that she was on the way, and she would find the local police waiting for her to help her find a place to stay.

She found most people accepted her, but many thought she was a man. She said

“…the idea of a woman traveling alone is so completely outside the experience and beyond the imagination of everyone that it’s universally assumed I’m a man. This convenient illusion is fostered by a very short haircut and a contour-obliterating shirt.”

She often stopped to admire the sights, after a long bike ride, for example. Here’s what she wrote about the Ghorband Valley in Afghanistan:

It was …” the most wonderful cycle ride of my life. Surely this must have been the Garden of Eden….High hills look down on paddy-fields and vivid patches of young wheat and net vineyards; orchards of apricot, peach, almond, apple and cherry trees smothered in blossom, and on woods of willows, ash, birch and sinjid [like a Russian or Persian olive], their new leaves shivering and glistening in wind and sun. “

“…At intervals there are breaks in the walls of sheer rock on either side and then one sees the more distant peaks of the Hindu Kush rising to 18,000 feet, their snows so brilliant that they are like Light itself, miraculously solidified and immobilized. …If I am murdered en route it will have been well worthwhile!”

More Journeys of Dervla Murphy

Places she has traveled: Gaza, the Balkans, the Andes, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Nepal, Kenya, Transylvania, Israel and Palestine, Siberia, Bombay, far eastern Russia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.

Most recently, she traveled to Russia (Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals) in her 70s and her last book was a family trip with her daughter and granddaughters to Cuba in 2009.

She broke away from travel writing to write two books about current events in England and Ireland. In 1975  She wrote Tales From Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort about conditions among immigrants in Bradford and Birmingham, in England. In 1979 she wrote A Place Apart: Ireland in the 1970s.

Reading about Dervla’s Adventures

If you want to read some of Dervla’s books, I suggest this order:

First, read Full Tilt about her famous first adventure. It’s so enjoyable and gives you a sense of her exuberant love of life. Then go on to Tibetan Foothold, which continues her adventures working in a Tibetan refugee camp in the foothills of the Himalayas, meeting the Dalai Lama, and bicycling the Himalayas in late 1963. In between, or after, read Wheels within Wheels, her autobiography, to get a sense of who this marvelous woman is and why her story is so gripping.

I could go on and on above Dervla Murphy – and I will. I’ll follow up soon with more on her further adventures and her later life.

A few years ago a video called “Who is Dervla Murphy“ was created. You can get it on Vimeo ($13). I’ll warn you that it’s difficult to understand her and there is no closed caption available, but I enjoyed seeing her and learning more about her life.

You might also enjoy this 2010 interview with Dervla.

Read my Goodreads reviews of Tibetan Foothold. 

Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive money if you buy a book from one of these links.