Search results for ""author dervla murphy""

A first-hand account of the life of travel writer Dervla Murphy in which she tells of her early life in Lismore, Co. Waterford, in her rather unusual household. Her father was the county librarian and her mother a chronic invalid. An only child, Dervla was allowed from the age of seven to freely roam on her own. At ten, she cycled ten miles to a local mountain, climbed it, then lost herself on the way down, and was forced to stay out all night - much to the distress of her parents. Living in a house that was crumbling around their ears, she reveals how her family hid a Republican who was later hanged, how she tested herself (with hot water) to increase her pain threshold, how she avoided an insane and shrieking maid, who was convinced that Dervla's parents were fried eggs, and how she helped another maid give birth under the kitchen table. An early love of books and writing, led her to enter a writing competition arranged by a local newspaper, and she won first prize for five weeks in a row.

Read more less

In "The Waiting Land" (first published in 1967) Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal's different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country's natural grandeur and beauty. This is the third of Dervla Murphy's early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it can also be seen as the completion of a trilogy of books concerned with her experience of self- sufficient mountain cultures, first tasted in crossing Persia and Afghanistan in "Full Tilt", and deepened with her experience of working with Tibetan refugees in the frontiers of Northern India, as told in "Tibetan Foothold". Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.

Read more less

"The Island That Dared" is a passionate book from the pen of Dervla Murphy, which begins with a three-generational family holiday in Cuba. Led by their redoubtable hard-walking grandmother, the trio of young girls and their mother soon find themselves camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars with only crabs and mosquitoes for company. This pure Swallows and Amazons experience confirms Dervla in her quest to understand the unique society that has been created by the Cuban Revolution. She returns again and again to explore the island, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, "The Island That Dared" builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility, and to stand against the all-but-overwhelming fire-power of capitalism. Whatever the fate of Cuba, "The Island That Dared" beautifully fulfils the role of a great travel book, 'to catch the moment on the wing, and stop it in Time' - Colin Thubron.

Read more less

Silverland charts Dervla Murphy's extraordinary expedition through the snowscapes of Far Eastern Russia. No stranger to adventure, the intrepid septuagenarian's mid-winter journey takes her beyond Siberia to the furthest corners of Russia - areas proximate to Japan, Mongolia and the Arctic Circle. Here she discovers a strange world of lynx and elks, indigenous tribes and shamanism, reindeer broth and taiga-berry pie. She takes the coal-fuelled slow-train around regions hardly exposed to tourism and there she meets a host of colourful and generous characters. They invite this unconventional Irish Babushka into their homes where she enjoys fascinating fireside debate bolstered by steaming samovars of sweet tea. Just like its author, Silverland is insightful, warm and truly original.

Read more less

In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.

Read more less

Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the ground, and to puzzle out for herself what might be done to alleviate the suffering of all who wish to share this land and to make peace in the region a possibility. Meeting the wise, the foolish and the frankly deluded, she gradually knits together a picture of the patchwork that constitutes both sides of the divide - Hamas and Fatah, rural and urban, refugee, indigenous inhabitant, Russian, Black Hebrew and Kabbalist to name but a fraction. She finds compassion and empathy in both communities, but is also appalled by instances of its lack on both sides - a Palestinan woman who will not concede the suffering of Jewish civilian victims of a suicide bomber, and the Jewish inhabitants of Hebron who make the lives of their Muslim neighbours a living hell. Clinging to hope, Dervla comes to believe that despite its difficulties the only viable future lies in a single democratic state of Israel/Palestine, based on one person, one vote - a One-State Solution.

Read more less

One winter, Dervla Murphy, the four-footed Hallam (the mule) and her six-year-old daughter Rachel explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas - on the Pakistan side of the disputed border with Kashmir. For three months they travelled along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby valleys. Even when beset by crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, an assault by a lascivious dashniri, the unnerving melancholy of the Balts - the heroic highland farmers who inhabit the area - and Rachel's continual probing questions, this formidable traveller retained her enthusiasm for her surroundings and her sense of humour. First published in 1977, "Where the Indus is Young" is pure Murphy. 'The grandeur, weirdness, variety and ferocity of this region cannot be exaggerated,' she writes of the sub-zero temperatures, harsh winds and whipping sands that they faced. However much the region may have changed due to current day political situations her descriptions of the mountain splendour and cultures she explores are appropriately timeless.

Read more less

Braving hunger, heat exhaustion, unbearable terrain and cultures largely untouched by civilization, Dervla Murphy chronicles her determined trip through nine countries, through snow and ice in the mountains and miles of barren land in the scorching desert. Full Tilt is a highly individual account by a celebrated travel writer based on the daily diary Murphy kept while riding through Yugoslavia, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India. Murphy's charm and gracious sensitivity as a writer and a traveler reveals not only civilizations of exotic people and places but the wonder of a woman alone on an extraordinary adventure.

Read more less

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and spoke openly to her about life in their open-air prison. What she finds are a people who, far from the story we are so often fed, overwhelmingly long for peace and an end to the violence that has so grossly distorted their lives. The impression we take away from the book is of a people whose real, complex, nuanced voice has rarely been heard before. A MONTH BY THE SEA gives unique insight into the way in which isolation has shaped this society: how it radicalises young men and plays into the hands of dominating patriarchs, yet also how it hardens determination not to give in and turns family into a towering source of support. Underlying the book is Dervla's determination to try to understand how Arab Palestinians and Israeli Jews might forge a solution and ultimately live in peace. Dervla looks long and hard at the hypocrisies of Western and Israeli attitudes to peace', and at Palestinian attitudes to terrorism. While this shattered people long for a respite from the bombings that have ripped a hole, both literally and psychologically, in their world, it seems that politicians have an agenda that pays little attention to their plight.

Read more less

A Place Apart is a remarkable geographical and psychological travelogue that rises above history, politics, theology and economics. Created by a southern Irishwoman, cycling into the mayhem of Northern Ireland in order to try and sort out her own opinions and emotions about this troubled land. She came equipped with her own childhood experiences of murder and Republican martyrdom, but was otherwise unfettered by sectarian loyalties and armed with a delightful curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar and penetrating intelligence. She travelled extensively through both town and country, frequently finding herself in horrifying situations, and sometimes among people stiff with hate and grief: but equally, she discovered an unquenchable spirit everywhere that refused to die. Other Dervla Murphy titles published by Eland. Original Hardbacks: A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza, The Island that Dared: Journeys in Cuba, Eland Classics: Wheels within Wheels, Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle, In Ethiopia with a Mule, Where the Indus is Young: A Winter in Baltistan, Tibetan Foothold, The Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal, On a Shoestring to Coorg.

Read more less

The eight feet belong to Dervla Murphy, her nine-year-old daughter Rachel and Juana, an elegant mule, who together clambered the length of Peru, from Cajamarca near the border with Ecuador, to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, over 1300 miles to the south.With only the most basic necessities to sustain them and spending most of their time above 10,000 feet, their journey was marked by extreme discomfort, occasional danger and even the temporary loss of Juana over a precipice. Yet mother and daughter, a formidable duo, were unflagging in their sympathetic response to the perilous beauty and impoverished people of the Andes.In this extraordinary adventure, Dervla Murphy is at her intrepid best, facing up to the terrors, horrors and joys of her journey along the mountain paths.

Read more less

This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. Anchored by her daughter's delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually and agriculturally self- sufficient Highlands. If travel is underwritten by an unwitting search for a lost paradise, this is a quest that was achieved - made possible with the right sort of travelling companion.

Read more less

Through Siberia by Accident is a book about a journey that didn't happen - and what happened instead.Dervla Murphy never had any intention of spending three months in the vast territories of Siberia. Instead she had planned to go to Ussuriland, because it appealed to her as a place free from tourism. But by accident, or rather because she had an accident - a painful leg injury -, she found herself stymied in Eastern Siberia, a place she knew very little about. Although hardly able to walk, her subsequent experiences, in an unexpected place, and in an incapacitated state, provided many pleasant surprises. Above all she was struck by the extraordinary hospitality, generosity and helpfulness of the Siberians who made this strange phenomenon - a maimed Irish babushka - so welcome in their towns and homes.This book is an extraordinary story of fortitude and resourcefulness as Dervla Murphy finds friendship and culture in a seemingly monotonous, bleak and inhospitable place far from what we know as 'civilised'. Through Siberia by Accident is a voyage of Siberian self-discovery.

Read more less

David Attenborough, Dion Leonard (Finding Gobi), Dervla Murphy and Brian Jackman are just four of the authors whose work features in this new anthology from Bradt focusing on true stories about travelling with animals. In Beastly Journeys, there are 46 tales of extraordinary animal travel experiences, from hilarious holidays with pets to journeys on which wild animals somehow came along for the ride, including: David Attenborough tries to get an armadillo through Paraguayan customs; adventurer Ash Dykes takes a white cockerel to Maromokotro to ward off evil spirits; Mike Gerrard shares a car journey from Belsize Park to Canvey Island with a python; Brian Jackman rides, walks and swims with Abu the elephant; Bradt New Travel Writer of the Year Dom Tulett rows with a kingfisher; and John Rendall travels to Africa with Christian, the lion he bought at Harrods and raised in west London. Also included is a brand new piece of writing from ultramarathon runner Dion Leonard about his experience with Gobi, the stray dog who accompanied him for 80 miles over the treacherous Tian Shian mountains. A mix of new, previously unpublished writers and old favourites are included, with extracts from writers such as Mark Shand (Travels on my Elephant), Dervla Murphy (Eight Feet in the Andes) and Robert Louis Stevenson (Travels with a Donkey), not to mention Gerald Durrell, 19th-century explorer Isabella Bird and renowned publisher Michael Joseph. Compelling, engaging, surprising, humorous and entertaining. if this book proves one thing it's that travel with animals is every bit as unpredictable as you would expect it to be.

Read more less

Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of South, West and East Africa and most recently of the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel. Dervla s style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for her journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. Finally, between these covers, we are able to catch up with her work in its entirety. What shines through is her passionate engagement with the world and its injustices, and her utter independence of mind. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla s writing her journalism and her twenty-four books selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing. With a preface by Colin Thubron

Read more less

Becoming a parent need to not put an end to wanderlust. That's the message in this new anthology from Bradt, the latest in a series of collections of real-life tales focusing on different aspects of travel. With contributions from a range of both well-known, professional travel writers and newer writers from the UK and North America, this engaging and entertaining compilation of 37 stories lifts the lid on the perils and joys of travelling with babies, toddlers and teenagers in locations spanning five continents. Contributors include renowned travel writer Dervla Murphy, National Geographic Traveller Editorial Director Maria Pieri, multi-award winning authors Adrian Phillips and Mike Unwin, and nature writers Amy-Jane Beer and Nicola Chester to name just a few. Potentially life-threatening situations, confessions of inept parenting and celebrations of derring-do are all part of the mix. There's plenty of adventurous travel, from trekking with toddlers in the Himalayas to sailing en famille across the Atlantic Ocean and the first circumnavigation of Mauritius by bicycle. Read how one mother threatens to dump her baby on jobsworth airport officials, how a father inadvertently takes his daughters to a brothel, and how one family turned up six hours early for a flight. and still managed to miss it. Join families paddling with crocodiles and getting their jeep stuck on a beach as the tide is coming in, or eleven-month-old Rory as he eats alongside marine iguanas and three-year-old Quin who befriends a family of cockroaches. At times comical, hair-raising or just plain fun, there are also magical moments with wild creatures or in wild places. For anyone who has ever travelled with children, or wondered what it must be like to head out into the unknown with little ones in tow, this is a captivating read.

Read more less