Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a traveler in her early 30s, liberated from looking after her invalid mother in Ireland

she set off for India on a bicycle. It was a journey which took her six months to

complete, cost her 64 pounds and was recounted in a best-selling book called Full Tilt.

Since then she's written many other accounts of many other journeys to become one of our most celebrated travel writers.

Now 61, she says she'll continue to travel as long as

she's physically able. I still get a terrific charge from packing my bag and

heading off she says. She is Dervler Murphy and packing your bag and heading off

Dervler is something that you resolved to do apparently when you were really very

very young. Can you remember the moment when you thought

I know what my life is going to be about?

Well I suppose it wasn't quite knowing what my life would be about,

but it was knowing very definitely that there was one thing I wanted to do in the course of my life and that was cycle to India.

And I was 10 and I just been given a second hand bicycle for my 10th birthday and an atlas by my grandfather.

And I had discovered not being very good at geography yet, but I just discovered that you could actually, apart from, you know, getting across to Turkey,

you could cycle all the way from Europe into India.

And it was one day early in December just about a week after I got these two gifts. I was cycling up a hill and I can remember looking

down and thinking well if I went on doing this for long enough I'd actually get to it

what pushing just tiny the pedals round yes and and was it was it was it more than

then just a childish ambition? Was it something that you fully intended to do?

Oh, absolutely, yes. And I never spoke about it to anybody at that stage because you know I knew what the

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