During the particularly harsh winter of 1963, Dervla Murphy rode her bicycle across Europe, Persia, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, Pakistan and India. This account of her extraordinary solo journey tells of her resourcefulness in the face of personal dangers and unexpected encounters. Dervla Murphy has also written ''In Ethiopia with a Mule'', ''Muddling through in Madagascar'', ''Eight Feet in the Andes'', ''On a Shoestring to Coorg'', ''The Waiting Land'' and ''Where the Indus is Young''.When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India.A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.