According to the book jacket, she wrote four book as a travel writer, and the it was the itinerary, and the discovery that a woman biked through a part of the world I, as a modern woman, would not even dare to attempt with an armed body guard. In 1963, she biked the bulk of the way from Ireland to India, spending large amounts of time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Her other books include Tibetan Foothold, about her work with refugee children in Dharamsala, The Waiting Land, about Nepal, and In Ethiopia with a Mule.
Miss Murphy travelled with two pairs of underwear, two shirts, 1 pair of pant, two book, 6 notebooks and 12 pens, slept in the nude, was not above arm-twisting an official to keep to her route, carried a gun, and left without the knowledge of how to repair her bike, depending on bike shops for the first months of the trip until she realized she could do better than fix a broken screw with a hammer! She planned the trip on receiving her bike at age ten, and 22 years later she started her trip across Europe in the dead of winter! She calls her bike Roz, and every entry she writes "we" as Roz is her travel companion throughout.
I have watched the news about Afghanistan since the 9/11/2001. This was embarrassingly late into adulthood, since I distinctly remember hearing about mission activity along the "Silk Road" in my church-going days, and during the Gulf war knowing about US General Swartzkopf and seeing images of Kuwait on fire. Why my brother understood these places and history decades before me, I will never know. I hardly understood where the nations in the middle east were, just that they were somewhere near Jerusalem , the root of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and the disputes that followed.
This is an interesting take from her visit to Kabul:
Russians seem to handle the propaganda tool of aid to backward countries much more intelligently than the American's do. They achieve lots of little things - electricity for small towns, paving city streets, building silos and presenting superior seeds for crops- as well as launching big projects such as roads, whereas the Americans concentrate on enormous schemes - roads and dams that cost t=five times what the Russians spend but will take years to complete and make no impression whatever on the mids of simple people. The more I see of life in these 'underdeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse fore America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession...I don't claim to know the right answer to the 'underdeveloped' problem but I feel most strongly that the communist answer is less wrong than the Western; the Communists have much more imaginative understanding of different national temperaments...They want to impose Communism as a way of life, but with the minimum of damage to the traditional foundations of the country concerned, whereas Westerners have told me repeatedly that they want to bulldoze those foundations right away and start a nice, new, hygienic society from scratch - and ambition that seems to me almost too stupid to be true.
Another nice quote about her view on Afghanistan "poverty":
" I prefer to call it simplicity, since poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs."
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| These are landscape photos from Wikipedia's entry on Afghanistan. Not the dry jihadist land I had envisioned from the hunt of Osama Bin Laden Top left: Band e-Amir National Park Top right: Salang Pass in Parwan Province Bottom left: Korangal Valley in Kunar Province Bottom right: Kajaki Dam in Helmand Province |
The world changes in time and space, and we tend to rewrite history as we move to the present. It is a great pleasure to see a capsule of a time and place that is no longer possible to see. My library has provided that for this week and I hope I have time to finish the story!
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