On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of Southern India

‘Dervla Murphy is the best kind of traveller: observant high-spirited open-minded and impervious to discomfort…[Her] keen appreciation of natural beauty makes the tiny province of Coorg appear as an earthly paradise.’—Sunday Telegraph One of the world’s great travel writers Dervla Murphy and her young daughter Rachel—with little money no taste for luxury and few concrete plans—meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India Cape Comorin in 1973. Interested in everything they see but only truly enchanted by people they stay in fishermen’s huts and no-star hotels travelling in packed-out buses on foot and by boat. But instead of pressing ever onwards they double back to the place they liked most the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. In this book Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamom-scented spiritually and agriculturally self-sufficient highlands.