However, the machine proves useful as a bag carrier while Dervla goes on her one-footed way. After injuring her foot she buys a Thai-manufactured bicycle, which purchase spawns new complications and a few hazards in the mountainous provinces of Xam Nuea and Xieng Khouang. Dervla's plans to trek though the high mountains, far from the country's few motor roads, soon run into complications, for which a variety of explanations are given, both comic and sinister. In 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, a Communist government took over and tourists were excluded until 1990 - not that many had ever put Laos on their itinerary. For this country hardly ever hits the headlines, although its small population played a significant part during the Secret War (the covert operation carried out by the US, running parallel to the Vietnam War). When Dervla Murphy mentioned that Laos was to be her next destination, most people looked a little puzzled. She packs only one change of clothes and her Scrabble set.Paperback. Now 85, she has just returned from Jordan where she stayed in a Palestinian refugee camp. She's documented it all, from meeting a tiger when cycling through the Nepalese Terai, watching the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie single-handedly quell a student riot in Addis Ababa, crossing the Indus gorge on foot and losing her pack-horse - panicked by a leopard - camping in the mountains of Cameroon. It's her love of the unpredictable that spurs her on, she says - and the thought of a pint around the next corner, ideally Guinness (although she settled for Beerlao on a trek through Laos). Since then, she's proved insuppressible, rolling out books including Silverland about a mid-winter journey from Moscow to the Russian Far East, and Through the Embers of Chaos set in the Balkans. 25 automatic pistol which she used twice: once in Bulgaria to scare off wolves and again in Azerbaijan when she fired a warning shot at a Kurd who tried to assault her. She had £65 to her name, spare underwear and carried a. Two decades later, in 1963, she embarked on a six-month cycle ride on an Armstrong Cadet from her home in Lismore, Ireland, to Delhi. Her wanderlust began at the age of 10, when her parents gave her a second-hand bicycle and an atlas for her birthday. But this intrepid octogenarian has written 24 travel books covering 54 countries. She has never learnt to drive and is terrified of flying.

One Foot in Laos by Dervla Murphy