Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and planned a trip to India. 21 years later, in 1963, she finally set off on the journey. She cycled across a frozen Europe during one of the worst winters in memory, through Persia and Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan, and finally to India. She was particularly taken by the landscape and people of Afghanistan, calling herself “Afghanatical” and claiming that the Afghan “is a man after my own heart”. Along the way, she made friends, fought off wolves and lecherous policemen, encountered blizzards and blistering heat, and achieved the realisation of her childhood dream.

Full Tilt was only the first in of Murphy’s accounts of her travel adventures, and provides an exciting introduction to this remarkable woman..