Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
by Dervla Murphy
Superb! What a journey, and what a woman! I’d even venture to call her a lady—she does all those ladylike things, like slog through dust storms in blistering heat; bathe in creeks, puddles and icy mountain rivers; wear shorts decayed to the point of indecency; sleep in flea infested blankets amid a pile of local people; eat rancid ghee (but only once);sweat like a sewer in the day and freeze to ice in the night; eat everything offered until she got to India and found the food too full of spice to swallow.
Tea with salt? Broad beans munched raw? Dried mulberries? I've seen a mulberry in the wild--she calls them "the sweetest of all fruit."
The only thing that didn't please me about this narrative is that she condensed the first part of the journey, from Dunkirk (France) to Teheran, into 425 Kindle "locations". To put that in perspective, the whole narrative only makes up 3700 locations. That means over 2/3 of the distance, 3300 miles, was squeezed into about 10% of the book. Since the book was created from her travel journals, I guess she didn't take very good notes at first.
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