<p>While world attention was focused on Bucharest after the execution of Ceausescu, acclaimed travel writer Dervla Murphy spent eight months in Transylvania sharing the everyday lives of ordinary Romanians. Upon her arrival soon after the revolution, Murphy found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered; unlike other East Europeans, the Romanians had had no warning that they were about to be liberated. During a return visit in 1991, she noticed a profound change in the national mood. Candid and eye-opening, Transylvania and Beyond describes a journey on two levels - wandering through the remotest corners of the Carpathians, on foot or by bicycle, and into the often daunting mental terrain of a post-Communist society where nothing is quite as it seems. Murphy was overwhelmed by the warmth of the hospitality she received. In urban blocs, small towns and traditional villages she spent time with teachers, factory-workers, writers, farmers, professors, engineers, vets, army officers, shepherds, students and doctors. As they revealed their hopes, fears and prejudices to her, Dervla gained some unexpected insights into what she calls "one of Europe's least European countries."</p>

Transylvania And Beyond

Travel

Murphy, D.

Europe

RANDOM HOUSE UK

The author recounts her adventures in Cameroon. Travelling with her daughter and accompanied by a Cameroonian horse they overcome floods, malaria, marriage proposals from tribal chiefs, and stray into a restricted zone around Lake Nyos, where a cloud of volcanic gas had recently killed over 2,000 villagers. The author also wrote Muddling Through in Madagascar, On a Shoestring to Coorg and The Waiting Land.

CAMEROON WITH EGBERT

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

ON A SHOESTRING TO COORG

Specialty Travel

<p>In The Waiting Land seasoned travel writer Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal's different tribes, the customes of an ancient, complex civilization and the country's natural grandeur and beauty. With her special brand of Irish understatement, she revels in the unpredictability of her journey and in the surprises which make her travels in that unique country such a stirring experience. Having settled in a hamlet in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle, and on foot into the remote Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveler reveal not only the vitality of an ancient culture facing the challenge of Westernization, but the wonder and excitement of her marvelous adventures.</p>

The Waiting Land

Asia

Eight Feet In The Andes

South America

An account of a gruelling journey through remote and hostile regions of Ethiopia, alone except for a pack-mule. Originally published in 1968.

In Ethiopia With a Mule

Africa

One winter, Dervla Murphy, the four-footed Hallam and her six-year-old daughter Rachel explored `Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas - on the Pakistan side of the disputed border with Kashmir. For three months they traveled along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby valleys. Even when beset by crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, an assault by a lascivious dashniri, the unnerving melancholy of the Balts - the heroic highland farmers who inhabit the area - and Rachel's continual probing questions, this formidable traveler retained her enthusiasm for her surroundings and her sense of humor. First published in 1977, Where the Indus is Young is pure Murphy.

Where The Indus Is Young

Tibetan Foothold

The moving tale of Dervla Murphy's experiences working in the Tibetan refugee camps of Northern India in the sixties.

John Murray

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Books by Murphy, D.