Intrepid writer carried pistol as she rode her bike from Ireland to India in 1963

On her 10th birthday, in receipt of an atlas and a bicycle, Dervla Murphy conceived a plan to cycle from her home in Ireland to India. More than two decades later, by then in her 30s and after the death of her parents, she set off.

The six-month journey, on a bike she called Roz, took her from deepest winter in northern France, across communist eastern Europe and the wilds of Iran and Afghanistan to monsoon-drenched India – and it established her as an adventurer in the days long before the ‘‘hippy trail’’ had been worn. The resulting book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, made her name as a new breed of professional travel writer, one who was loved for her lack of self-regard and unsentimental frankness as much as for her daring.

Murphy, who has died aged 90, was to make a career of seeking out remote corners of the Earth, shunning Western comforts and companionship, and chronicling how she found them in two dozen books written in refreshingly unembellished prose.

Yet if she was straightforward in her writing, in person she could be quite enigmatic and prickly. One publisher compared the experience of getting information out of her to ‘‘trying to open an oyster with a wet bus ticket’’.

Having taken the precaution of posting ahead several spare tyres to embassies en route, Murphy set off for India in 1963 equipped with a pistol, which she had learnt to fire in the mountains around her home in Lismore, northeast of Cork. Within the first month she shot at a pack of wolves as they tore at her clothes after she became stranded in a snow drift and scared off a large, skimpily clad man whom she found climbing into her bed one night in Iran.

While Murphy took pleasure in describing the landscapes she passed through, it was the details of the disasters and difficulties she encountered that made for addictive reading. She was nothing if not resourceful. On the freezing Babusar Pass in Pakistan she was forced to tie herself to a cow to get across a raging ravine.

She was unfazed by events that might have forced a lesser traveller to turn for home. She had a natural gift for friendship, even in apparently hostile places. ‘‘Most people in the world are helpful and trustworthy,’’ she concluded and was deeply critical of mass tourism and floods of people who rarely did more than take pictures of those they met.

She was disdainful of consumerism and its effects, from which she constantly craved escape, notably in Afghanistan. By the time she reached Delhi, she had covered almost 5000 kilometres, cycling an average of about 120km a day.

Dervla Murphy was born into a family of modest means in Lismore. Her father, who