The Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal

Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, Dervla Murphy makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle, and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveler reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernization, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures. First published in 1967, The Waiting Land was a difficult book for Dervla. As she said herself: `It was a light-hearted account of an experience that had not been light-hearted'.