Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

She certainly is a tough and determined woman, Dervla Murphy. In appallingly cold conditions and the start of her journey, and equally difficult hot conditions at the end, she shows she is not one to give up easily.
Written in diary form, she advises in the introduction, she resisted the temptation to heavily edit the book and introduce facts and statistics. This perhaps takes out some of the facts around her journey, but concentrates the content on the people and places as she encounters them.
She doesn't suffer fools gladly (but then who should?), but is also not shy to share stories where she herself is made to look foolish. I always find her books entertaining.

An example of her determination (around pages 89-91 in this edition) - in northern Afghanistan, having sustained three broken ribs (from being hit accidentally by a rifle butt in a fight on a bus!), she is bitten on the toe by a scorpion, for which she is dosed up on a serum treatment, only to be bitten on the neck by a hornet the following day. To which she comments “Evidently the scorpion serum is still operating, as there were no ill effects, except for the immediate pain.”

And her description of her brief camel ride when she met some Afghani traders in northern Pakistan (P203): “(1) The camel knelt down. (2) I sat on the saddle. (3) The camel stood up. (4) The camel took one step. (5) I fell off. Fortunately this was exactly what the camel owner expected me to do, and he caught me half way to the ground... A camel saddle is a preposterous thing, like a wooden pouffe balanced on the hump; doubtless there are ways of not falling off, but my Pushto was unequal to following the owner's instructions.”