On a Shoestring to Coorg: A Travel Memoir of India - Hardcover

Dervla Murphy has written more than twenty books recounting her adventures all over the world on foot, mule, bicycle, and just about every other conveyance imaginable. Her books Full Tilt, Eight Feet in the Andes, The Waiting Land, Muddling Through in Madagascar, On a Shoestring to Coorg, Cameroon with Egbert, Transylvannia and Beyond, The Ukimwi Road, and South from the Limpopo are available from The Overlook Press.

In the fall of 1973, Murphy responded to a periodic travel itch by taking her five-year-old daughter Rachel to India, a journey that began in Bombay, proceeded down the coast, then turned inland to the remote and rugged highlands of southern India. They traveled by train and bus, staying at hostels or primitive hotels. Murphy found that Rachel was a link rather than a barrier to the natives. They discovered in Coorg an atypical India: neither crowded nor impoverished, Coorg boasts a magnificent landscape, temperate climate and congenial people (a curiously Anglicized atmosphere). The Murphys visited local families and had occasion to explore a culture in which ancestor veneration is practiced. The author discusses caste in detail; she and Rachel attended festivals, a christening ceremony, funeral and wedding. In their journeys they encountered Tibetan refugees, Western hippies, transplanted Europeans. Readers who enjoyed Murphy's Muddling Through in Madagascar will find this lively travel memoir to their taste as well.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.