Intrepid writer carried pistol as she rode her bike from Ireland to India in 1963
On her 10th birthday, in receipt of an atlas and a bicycle, Dervla Murphy conceived a plan to cycle from her home in Ireland to India. More than two decades later, by then in her 30s and after the death of her parents, she set off.
The six-month journey, on a bike she called 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 adventurer in the days long before the ‘‘hippy trail’’ had been worn. The resulting book, 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.
Murphy, who has died aged 90, was to make a career of seeking out remote corners of the Earth, shunning Western comforts and companionship, and chronicling how she found them in two dozen books written in refreshingly unembellished 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 information out of her to ‘‘trying to open an oyster with a wet bus ticket’’.
Having taken the precaution of posting ahead several spare tyres to embassies en route, Murphy set off for India in 1963 equipped with a pistol, which she had learnt to fire in the mountains around her home in Lismore, northeast of Cork. Within the first month she shot at a pack of wolves as they tore at her clothes after she became stranded in a snow drift and scared off a large, skimpily clad man whom she found climbing into her bed one night in Iran.
While Murphy took pleasure in describing the landscapes she passed through, it was the details of the disasters and difficulties she encountered that made for addictive reading. 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 ravine.
She was unfazed by events that might have forced a lesser traveller to turn for home. She had a natural gift for friendship, even in apparently hostile places. ‘‘Most people in the world are helpful and trustworthy,’’ she concluded and was deeply critical of mass tourism and floods of people who rarely did more than take pictures of those they met.
She was disdainful of consumerism and its effects, from which she constantly craved escape, notably in Afghanistan. By the time she reached Delhi, she had covered almost 5000 kilometres, cycling an average of about 120km a day.
Dervla Murphy was born into a family of modest means in Lismore. Her father, who
‘‘When I set out on a journey, my spirits rise. I’m never lonely or frightened.’’
had spent time at the Sorbonne, was a librarian; her mother was invalided by arthritis when Murphy was a baby.
Murphy’s formal convent education came to an end when she was 14. She cared for her parents, with whom she developed close and complicated relationships, for the next 16 years. It was a period she later recalled 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, she embraced her new independence and was determined to remain unfettered. She 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.
She had already written four books when, in 1968, she gave birth to her daughter Rachel, after an affair with Terence de Vere White, literary editor of the Irish Times. She felt that it would not be fair to take a baby to Asia and so contented herself by writing for several years for the Irish Times. Soon after Rachel turned 5, however, Murphy took her to India.
Mother and daughter spent six months in the south before a winter travelling through the the Karakoram range. Rachel rode a retired polo pony, and the pair slept on the floors of flea-infested guesthouses.
In the early 1990s she took to her bike to explore rural Transylvania after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania and later pedalled across the Limpopo province to gauge South Africa’s changing social conditions. In her late seventies, accompanied by Rachel and three granddaughters, she continued to seek out new physically or politically isolated places, including Cuba.
With red cheeks and a strong Irish voice, Murphy had a weakness for Cafe Creme cigars and beer and, to some, cut an eccentric figure. She kept a rambling house in County Waterford with no television, central heating or washing machine, but several dogs. The bath was the river.
When asked in one interview why she continued to travel, Murphy concluded: ‘‘When I set out on a journey, my spirits rise. I’m never lonely or frightened.’’