On a Shoestring to Coorg
What a book! Because of Full Tilt, Dervla Murphy is often associated with travelling in India, but in fact, only On a Shoestring to Coorg and Tibetan Foothold (when she worked with Tibetan refugees in the north of India) describe her travels there.
This is the first book in which the reader is introduced to Rachel, Dervla Murphy's young daughter (four at the start of their trip to South India, and five at the end), and the book is a beautiful memoir of Rachel's first major overseas adventure with her mother. Flying into Mumbai, then taking a steamer to Panaji, followed by journeys by bus and train further south and further inland, Dervla and Rachel make a temporary home in the tiny, lush jungle region of Kodagu (Coorg), where they rent two tiny rooms in a new friend's empty Ain Mane (ancestral family home), which Dervla describes on P173 as 'Absolutely right for us', largely because it had no running water and electricity, thus allowing Dervla and Rachel to experience the most simplest of lives, and to integrate themselves fully into the community, as they cooked, shopped, bathed, washed and went about day to day life just as their new neighbours did. Extended trips and excursions from Coorg take Dervla and Rachel to some of South India's most beautiful, iconic and intriguing locations, including Madurai, with its extraordinary Sri Meenakshi temple (widely renowned as one of India's finest) and Cochin, with its Kathakali dancing, Chinese fishing nets and unique Jewish Quarter.
For me, the charm of 'On a Shoestring to Coorg' lies in the portrayal of an extraordinarily exciting new world being opened up to the young Rachel, for whom this trip is evidently a much valued '...apprenticeship to serious travelling' (P3) a la Mum! And in the depictions of the mother-daughter team's day to day life in this home away from home, the sense of the 'familiar meets unfamiliar' (meals must be cooked, groceries bought, ablutions attended to whether in Ireland or remotest South India!) which comes through in so much of Dervla Murphy's writing, is perhaps more appealingly stark in this book than in any of the others.
Rachel's next big adventure with her mother would come in the form of a winter in Baltistan, described in Where the Indus is Young, and there the conditions the pair experience (endure?!) together are a far cry from the carefree Coorg sunshine, and one comes away from the Coorg book envying the contentment which the sojourn in Coorg gave to Dervla and Rachel, and sensing that as mother-daughter bonding experiences go, this one must not have been far from perfect.
Sarah Ledger 2012
This is the first book in which the reader is introduced to Rachel, Dervla Murphy's young daughter (four at the start of their trip to South India, and five at the end), and the book is a beautiful memoir of Rachel's first major overseas adventure with her mother. Flying into Mumbai, then taking a steamer to Panaji, followed by journeys by bus and train further south and further inland, Dervla and Rachel make a temporary home in the tiny, lush jungle region of Kodagu (Coorg), where they rent two tiny rooms in a new friend's empty Ain Mane (ancestral family home), which Dervla describes on P173 as 'Absolutely right for us', largely because it had no running water and electricity, thus allowing Dervla and Rachel to experience the most simplest of lives, and to integrate themselves fully into the community, as they cooked, shopped, bathed, washed and went about day to day life just as their new neighbours did. Extended trips and excursions from Coorg take Dervla and Rachel to some of South India's most beautiful, iconic and intriguing locations, including Madurai, with its extraordinary Sri Meenakshi temple (widely renowned as one of India's finest) and Cochin, with its Kathakali dancing, Chinese fishing nets and unique Jewish Quarter.
For me, the charm of 'On a Shoestring to Coorg' lies in the portrayal of an extraordinarily exciting new world being opened up to the young Rachel, for whom this trip is evidently a much valued '...apprenticeship to serious travelling' (P3) a la Mum! And in the depictions of the mother-daughter team's day to day life in this home away from home, the sense of the 'familiar meets unfamiliar' (meals must be cooked, groceries bought, ablutions attended to whether in Ireland or remotest South India!) which comes through in so much of Dervla Murphy's writing, is perhaps more appealingly stark in this book than in any of the others.
Rachel's next big adventure with her mother would come in the form of a winter in Baltistan, described in Where the Indus is Young, and there the conditions the pair experience (endure?!) together are a far cry from the carefree Coorg sunshine, and one comes away from the Coorg book envying the contentment which the sojourn in Coorg gave to Dervla and Rachel, and sensing that as mother-daughter bonding experiences go, this one must not have been far from perfect.
Sarah Ledger 2012
Photo used under Creative Commons from Nithi clicks