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    Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
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    Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
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    Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
    Ebook317 pages6 hours

    Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

    By Dervla Murphy

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEland Publishing
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781906011727

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    Reviews for Full Tilt

    4/5

    96 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Dervla Murphy is beyond an amazing woman. Nothing stops her. She can move herself and her bike through rocks, snow, ice and wolves (animal and human) no matter what. It would be very interesting to visit the countries of her journey today, they sound beautiful and are now off limits to Americans. She became part of the cultures in each country with her curiosity and determination. I was very inspired and I am clear I like to travel in a different style!
    • 4/5
      A fascinating account from one of my favourite travel writers. He later work is a bit overly political but this is her first and its her journal entries she made this crazy trip.
    • 1/5
      This is such a poorly written book with racist tone and lots of whining about the "smelly-natives", Hinduphobia. The author isn't a great narrator either. This book is a collection of her travel journal written whilst traveling from Dunkirk to India. Also, even though her efforts are to be appreciate, it should be noted that the author didn't solely traveled by bicycle, she also took lots of bus rides and train.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating travelogue. Woman, traveling alone, mostly by bicycle and on foot from Ireland to India in the mid 60s. Talk about adventure. Focused mostly on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Interesting to contemplate in light of current geopolitics.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book begins as matter-of-factly as it ends: with Dervla Murphy announcing that—since it was her childhood ambition to ride a bicycle from her home in Ireland, to India—January of 1963 seemed as good a time as any to cross that item off her “To Do” list.And so off she goes—totally alone—with nothing like the kit that a long-distance cyclist might carry now, on a bicycle that many of us would not consider sturdy enough for a jaunt to the Post Office and back.The career of Travel Writer is an unusual one: since so much of it involves “ruining”. After all, the headline “The Ten Unspoiled Beaches of Anywhere” means that those beaches won’t be unspoiled too much longer. The job, most of the time, is giving directions to the Garden of Eden so a sweaty mob can hurry on down to Paradise and destroy it.The travel writers I tend to prefer are those who “board in dread”: believing that staying home would be so much better than going away. Paul Theroux is the classic example of this Reluctant Tourist: in book after book seeming to suggest that seeing distant places is fundamentally torture, mixed with episodes of simple misery.So, of course, I enjoyed this example of an amazing traveler, seeing amazing sights, having amazing adventures, because—much of the time—she’s enduring amazing hardship with the kind of “well...you know...shit happens” style of pluck and gumption that gets almost comical after reading awhile.To begin with, one of the elements that makes this book so thought-provoking is the fact (and it is a Fact) that—a little over forty years later—this journey could not be replicated...by anyone.The most optimistic, forceful, and pious Muslim woman could never ride a bicycle, unveiled and unaccompanied, along this route: Ireland, across Europe, to Tehran—all the way across Iran—all the way across Afghanistan—across the northern reach of Pakistan—and into India.The politics in the region have changed so much, and so many new battlefields have opened new wounds that now a woman just attempting the transit could expect no happy ending—and could only hope that her very dire end would be private. Not uploaded to social media so that her family, her friends, and people who knew her as a child would not be appalled by her blood-drenched end.In the happier (and certainly more innocent) world of 1963, Dervla Murphy has her troubles. Food is frequently scarce—and monotonous when abundant. Drinkable water is often a problem. Roads appear, here and there, but much of her route is unimproved. The people are dirty and smelly, and sometimes she’s sleeping on the floor in a corner. The route takes her through glaciers, and days when the metal of bicycle is too hot to touch.But all of it is just “foreign”—none of it is “lethal”—and, again and again, she demonstrates a rare gift of meeting people more than halfway: inspiring them to assist her, to collect simple gifts, and attract the kind of good will that allows her to continue.This book is, in a sense, one person’s “moon landing”. With a working bicycle, a few changes of clothes, and a few pounds of English money in her pocket, Dervla Murphy makes a journey that no one might ever duplicate in its logistical details—and absolutely no one will ever make again in its sense of visiting parts of the world before they became famous as military and ideological battlefields.Our traveler, in this case, just rode through—hoping for the best. On a lot of days, “the best” didn’t happen. But what often did happen was “very good”.Highly recommended for anyone who admires a story of high adventure presented without photographs, with some pert comments, and a modest kind of shrug. This book begins as matter-of-factly as it ends: with Dervla Murphy announcing that—since it was her childhood ambition to ride a bicycle from her home in Ireland, to India—January of 1963 seemed as good a time as any to cross that item off her “To Do” list.And so off she goes—totally alone—with nothing like the kit that a long-distance cyclist might carry now, on a bicycle that many of us would not consider sturdy enough for a jaunt to the Post Office and back.The career of Travel Writer is an unusual one: since so much of it involves “ruining”. After all, the headline “The Ten Unspoiled Beaches of Anywhere” means that those beaches won’t be unspoiled too much longer. The job, most of the time, is giving directions to the Garden of Eden so a sweaty mob can hurry on down to Paradise and destroy it.The travel writers I tend to prefer are those who “board in dread”: believing that staying home would be so much better than going away. Paul Theroux is the classic example of this Reluctant Tourist: in book after book seeming to suggest that seeing distant places is fundamentally torture, mixed with episodes of simple misery.So, of course, I enjoyed this example of an amazing traveler, seeing amazing sights, having amazing adventures, because—much of the time—she’s enduring amazing hardship with the kind of “well...you know...shit happens” style of pluck and gumption that gets almost comical after reading awhile.To begin with, one of the elements that makes this book so thought-provoking is the fact (and it is a Fact) that—a little over forty years later—this journey could not be replicated...by anyone.The most optimistic, forceful, and pious Muslim woman could never ride a bicycle, unveiled and unaccompanied, along this route: Ireland, across Europe, to Tehran—all the way across Iran—all the way across Afghanistan—across the northern reach of Pakistan—and into India.The politics in the region have changed so much, and so many new battlefields have opened new wounds that now a woman just attempting the transit could expect no happy ending—and could only hope that her very dire end would be private. Not uploaded to social media so that her family, her friends, and people who knew her as a child would not be appalled by her blood-drenched end.In the happier (and certainly more innocent) world of 1963, Dervla Murphy has her troubles. Food is frequently scarce—and monotonous when abundant. Drinkable water is often a problem. Roads appear, here and there, but much of her route is unimproved. The people are dirty and smelly, and sometimes she’s sleeping on the floor in a corner. The route takes her through glaciers, and days when the metal of bicycle is too hot to touch.But all of it is just “foreign”—none of it is “lethal”—and, again and again, she demonstrates a rare gift of meeting people more than halfway: inspiring them to assist her, to collect simple gifts, and attract the kind of good will that allows her to continue.This book is, in a sense, one person’s “moon landing”. With a working bicycle, a few changes of clothes, and a few pounds of English money in her pocket, Dervla Murphy makes a journey that no one might ever duplicate in its logistical details—and absolutely no one will ever make again in its sense of visiting parts of the world before they became famous as military and ideological battlefields.Our traveler, in this case, just rode through—hoping for the best. On a lot of days, “the best” didn’t happen. But what often did happen was “very good”.Highly recommended for anyone who admires a story of high adventure presented without photographs, with some pert comments, and a modest kind of shrug.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The highlights of this travelogue are undoubtedly Afghanistan and Pakistan. Readers who aren't acquainted (through her many later books) with Dervla Murphy's hard drinking, hard riding lifestyle might find this story a bit of a muddle. Take into account that this is essentially a first work by someone who travels in order to travel, rather than to write a comfortable book about travelling, and you might find her occasionally awkward or dry style less jarring. Unlike many who do something extraordinary and then write a passable book about it, Dervla Murphy then spends the rest of her life in (seemingly) constant motion, cycling and drinking her way across continents with as much aplomb as you or I'd go down to the shops. And yes, her writing style became smoother, and her insights into local cultures and issues very sharp indeed. What shines through in this early narrative though, and which is common to all of her work, is her fearless attitude and tremendous empathy for the people and cultures she travels through, and in many cases becomes a guest to. It is true that Dervla's insights may be at times naive, and certainly not informed by a university degree in political science or anthropology. But for just those same reasons, her commentary on tribal and village life in Afghanistan and Pakistan have considerable charm and value as an 'authentic' record.Few writers wrote so well about travelling in this area in 1963, the only comparable journeying - to my knowledge - was by the Australian Peter Pinney who recorded 15 years of travel through Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas in a series of books published in the 1950's and 1960's. Almost any of Dervla's books are recommended, but this is one of the best to start with. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in 'rough' travel, or seeking insights into the people of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This wasn't quite what I expected. This is basically a compilation of Murphy's letters she sent home from her travels, so there wasn't much back story into her personal life and her motivations to do such a daring feat for a woman of this time period. I loved the descriptions of each place she visited, but it kept me wanting more than it was offering. I have to abandon it for now for greener pastures.