Full Tilt
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £18.99
Publisher Description
Full Tilt is the inspiring true story of Dervla Murphy’s 1963 journey from Ireland to India on an Armstrong Cadet bicycle and the trials, landscapes and cultures she encountered along the way. The route takes her through the valleys and snowy mountain passes of Europe and India to the scorching deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the metal of her bicycle, Rozinante (named after Don Quixote’s steed), becomes too hot to touch. She travels alone, without luxuries, sleeping on the floors of teahouses or on blankets outdoors, vulnerable to wild animals, insects and thieves. However, she is often met with generosity and kindness, and shares many meaningful encounters with the locals. Her portrayal here gives a fascinating insight into the unique communities of the Middle East in the early 1960s.
Customer Reviews
A mind open to the world with fearless acceptance
Dervla Murphy is an engaging writer: forthright and humourous, she recounts the many adventures and misadventures on her bicycle ride from Ireland to India with an eye for detail and a pragmatic but witty stoicism. An extraordinarily brave and determined woman, she not infrequently drives herself beyond her strength and one asks oneself, as do several, of her supporters en route, if she is not simply being foolhardy. Now four decades later, one wonders if some of the peasant farmers who hosted her remain as desperately poor, and if their often beautiful environments lie still untouched by modernity, a very double-edged sword. Consider all that Afghanistan has had to endure.
It is also important to be reminded in our cruelly divided and divisive world that at heart most people, will welcome the stranger in their midst, perhaps, more especially, one who will eat with them.listen to their stories and try to understand the society she is passing through.