As a 60th birthday present to herself, Murphy undertakes a 3,000 mile journey through Eastern and Southern Africa on her Dawes Ascent mountain-bike, "the cyclist's equivalent of a Rolls-Royce," named Lear. The trip was a "self-described unwinding therapy.....a carefree ramble through some of the least hot areas of sub-Saharan Africa."

But "carefree" it is not, though nothing - not heat, torrential rains, hunger, illness, hostility or impassable roads - can stop her.

Murphy is greeted in Nairobi by drought and a mothers' hunger strike which rapidly degenerates into a riot when paramilitary troops arrive to disperse the women. Leaving the city as quickly as she can, Murphy contemplates the contrast between Western luxuries and construction projects alongside the shanty towns and hungry children.

From her first stop in a dusty village for a Tusker beer, AIDS predominates and a pattern is set which endures thoughout the lands and cultures she passes through during the coming months. By day she enjoys the solitude and scenery of rural Africa; by night she is embroiled in local discussions of politics and Western incursions and AIDS, often dodging individual pleas for help in getting to the land of opportunity - the West.

Ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS. In Africa, wherever she goes, it surrounds her. Some blame Western conspiracies and medical experiments; missionaries preach behavioral changes and deny condom distribution; men say they cannot survive without a variety of female partners; wives say their husbands refuse condoms; prositutes say they would have no business if they insisted on condom use.

Everywhere Murphy meets widows, orphans and more orphans.

She at first resists the pull of AIDS. For her this is a pleasure journey and she can do nothing to slow the epidemic. But it has become part of the fabric of culture, threatening traditional family life, taking the most productive and leaving behind the old and the young to fend for themselves.

In addition to the scourge of AIDS, Murphy finds much of Africa suffering from economic collapse, spurred in large part by misguided Western "development projects" that destroyed the local agrarian economy, often displacing the people and departing, leaving behind devastation and tribal strife.

She meets hospitality and hostility, and takes what comes; be it a bedbug, mosquito-infested tourist hotel, or an earthen floor, or a spontaneously offered bed in a local home. She sets out at dawn hardly knowing whether to expect a corrugated wartorn road or spectacular mountain scenery or a beguiling path that ends in a swamp (through which she is guided by a silent tribal elder). She pushes Lear up rutted mountain tracks and hurtles down, marveling at the African cyclists she meets everywhere - man cycling, two children on the cross bar, wife behind holding baby and toddler, and a heavy load balanced over all.

With a cast-iron stomach, she eats and drinks whatever is available (which is generally awful), especially enjoys her beer, cycles through bronchitis and is finally felled by malaria. Even that she comes to regard as fitting - ending her journey in Zimbabwe where "Blacks had been subjugated as nowhere else in British Africa." Murphy concludes that Westerners ought to get out of Africa once and for all - that Western systems have not "taken" and have only undermined traditional culture.

Whether you come to agree with her or not, her harrowing, thrilling, eye-opening and heartbreaking journey will stay with you when other travels are long forgotten.

The picture she painted of the seriousness and extent of the AIDS problem in Africa was well supported by her first-hand (if anecdotal) evidence. Subsequent developments have shown that her alarming portrayal was accurate, and hers was in print *years* before the authorities began to recognise the scope of the problem. She did an excellent job of illustrating the wide range of psychological devices used to deny or minimise the problem.

Her portrait of the plight of a well-informed woman who despaired of protecting herself against AIDS, saying "You just don't know what it means to be a woman in Africa" still haunts my memory.

Official accounts, however alarming, have not yet caught up with Murphy's detailing of the cultural and social situations that have made the present disaster inevitable. Slowly and belatedly, news accounts are reflecting what she told us years ago. She can hardly be faulted for failing to suggest a solution, when any solution must involve massive cultural change: iconceivable to the locals as well as to western liberals.

This is not a cheerful read, like some of her other books, but it may be one of her most important.

Bias note: I have read and enjoyed almost all of Dervla Murphy's books, and bought a couple. I'll buy the rest for my permanent library when cheaper paperbacks appear. I do not share her political views (which I believe are far to the left of mine), but I do not find that this has made her observations any less valuable. She has my respect.