However, she is often met with generosity and kindness, and shares many meaningful encounters with the locals. She travels alone, without luxuries, sleeping on the floors of teahouses or on blankets outdoors, vulnerable to wild animals, insects and thieves. The route takes her through the valleys and snowy mountain passes of Europe and India to the scorching deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the metal of her bicycle, Rozinante (named after Don Quixote’s steed), becomes too hot to touch. She is particularly known for her 1965 book Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a bicycle. Her name is Dervla Murphy, the touring cyclist and writer who became famous for her adventure travel books for over 40 years. We didn’t get as far as Siberia, exploring the big cities of Moscow and St Petersburg instead, but I recently came across an intrepid traveller who made that journey to the steppes of that vast part of the former Soviet Union - at the age of seventy three, partly by bike, and then by BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline) train: supplementing the Trans-Siberian railway with a connection to the Asia-Pacific. It was a truly memorable experience, and has inspired a personal fascination with the country and its history ever since. With the Siberian coldsnap recently and Russia increasingly in the international spotlight due to political tensions, my thoughts turned to a holiday I spent in Russia two years ago with my family.
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