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

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the 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 occurence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantites, 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. Twenty-five books later, she continued to travel in much the same style well into her eighties, it is a plea- sure to encounter the young Dervla just setting out on her travelling life.