On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of Southern India - Softcover

Dervla Murphy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780600127 ISBN 13: 9781780600123

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. Anchored by her daughter's delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually and agriculturally self- sufficient Highlands. If travel is underwritten by an unwitting search for a lost paradise, this is a quest that was achieved - made possible with the right sort of travelling companion.

About this title

Review:

A travel writer of rare quality and freshness time in Asia has opened her eyes; it has not closed her heart to the romance of fresh places and faces - --Observer

From the Back Cover:

With her five-year-old daughter as travelling companion, Dervla Murphy, veteran of solo journeys by mule and bicycle to some of the most inaccessible places on earth, had new but no less challenging concerns on this journey to India. Setting off for Bombay, with the minimum of organisation and plans to meander through the south, Dervla and Rachel stayed in fishermen’s huts and no-star hotels.

Travelling by boat and by peasant-filled bus, and making myriad friends along the way, they fell in love with Coorg, the smallest of India’s provinces, and stayed there for two months. Dervla Murphy’s account of this remote mountain paradise, famed for its landscapes, scented with honey, cardamon and oranges, is evocative, fresh and entertaining.

‘Murphy is the best kind of traveller: observant, high-spirited, open-minded, and impervious to discomfort, and Rachel is a honey... Their keen appreciation of India’s natural beauty makes the tiny province of Coorg appear as an earthly paradise’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘This is a charming book, bringing to immediate life the beautiful landscapes and friendly people of a little-known part of the sub-continent’
GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL

‘Murphy spans the wide range of sensation of India, where moments of a great happiness come hard upon frustration and stench’
GUARDIAN

‘A travel writer of rare heart and freshness... time in Asia has opened her eyes; it has not closed her heart to the romance of fresh places and faces’
OBSERVER

‘Vividly she records the harshness of Indian peasant life, the beauty of the countryside, the warmth and spontaneity of the Indian people’
LADY

‘This is a book that makes one realise how much of the real quality of life we in the West have lost’
DAILY TELEGRAPH

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1780600127
• ISBN 13: 9781780600123
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216