But I am not going out to overcome something, like an explorer or serious mountaineer. “Clearly there have been discomforts and extremes of temperature – though not a great deal.
“Well, I don’t terribly like that word in relation to my sort of travelling – it’s not anything to do with it,” she says, politely but firmly, in her low-pitched drawl, when I suggest that her pioneering trips must have presented challenges along the way. She gives you a firm handshake, looks you in the eye – and you just hope you pass muster. You get the feeling that over the course of 50-plus years of trailblazing and 26 intrepid travel books, she has got used to quickly gauging the temper of a place, and of people.
“Interviewing Dervla is like trying to open an oyster with a wet bus ticket,” her mentor and first publisher, Jock Murray, once said. Dervla Murphy, in India, on the journey that led to her writing Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle (1965)
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