Where the Indus Is Young: Walking to Baltistan - Softcover

Murphy, Dervla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006548016 ISBN 13: 9780006548010

Publisher: HarperCollins UK, 1995

Synopsis

One winter, Dervla Murphy and her six-year-old daughter Rachel walked into the Karakoram mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas and along the perilous Indus Gorge. Accompanied only by a gallant polo pony, they encountered conditions that tested the limits of their ingenuity, endurance, and courage. Hair-raising, gloriously subjective, and with the quirky vitality of fiction, the resulting book is a classic of travel writing

About this title

About the Author

Dervla Murphy was born in Co. Waterford, Ireland, of Dublin parents and still lives there. Since 1964 she has been regularly publishing descriptions of her journeys - by bicycle or on foot - in the remoter areas of four continents. She has also written about the problems of Northern Ireland, the hazards of the nuclear power industry and race relations in Britain.

From Publishers Weekly

In her 1963 classic Full Tilt, Irish writer Murphy recounted her seven-month bike trek from Dublin to Delhi. A decade later, the seasoned traveler returned to Asia with her six-year-old daughter, Rachel, this time determined to winter in Baltistan, an isolated northern province in Pakistan’s disputed Kashmir territory. In this memoir of that three-month journey, originally published in the UK in 1974, Murphy shares her and her daughter’s adventures along the disintegrating trails of the Indus Gorge in the Karakoram Mountains. "The grandeur, weirdness, variety and ferocity of this region cannot be exaggerated," she writes of the sub-zero temperatures, harsh winds, whipping sand and the constant threat of tumbling rocks that they faced picking their way through passes on pony and foot. Her colorful journal entries weave together impressions of the Karakoram’s "craggy, glistening peaks," reflections on the people who inhabit them and the romantic joys of daily life: sipping tea, dining on chapittis (thin unleavened bread, translated in the glossary along with other local terms) and wandering through bazaars in search of goods and gossip. Despite a preface and prologue that situate her trip, any profound contextualization vis-à-vis recent tension in Kashmir or Pakistan’s role in the war on terror is absent. Thus at times her experience feels surprisingly disconnected from the present, like when she bubbles with admiration for Pashtun culture or mentions her close friendship with Field Marshall Ayub Khan, a Pashtun and former military dictator of Pakistan. Her sumptuous descriptions of the mountain splendor and the obscure paths and cultures she explores, though, are appropriately timeless.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0006548016
• ISBN 13: 9780006548010
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272