India is no place for the faint-hearted cyclist. This is the story of Anne Mustoe's journey by bicycle through India, as she followed the path of the Ramayana's central characters Rama and Sita - and Hanuman, their divine helper.

Anne Mustoe's lone cycle ride began at Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames Embankment in London, and ended at the needle's original site at Heliopolis in Egypt. Weaving historical and cultural information with anecdotes from the trip, she tells the story of this unusual mission in exquisite detail.

Vikings, Romans, Viennese Turks, Native Americans, pilgrims, outlaws, football fans, ballerinas, and saints: thesemyriad wonderful characters populate the pages of Anne Mustoe's fascinating book as she pedals along three very different, but equally evocative, roadsthe Amber Route from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the Santa Fe Trail from the Missouri River to New Mexico, and the Pilgrims' Way of St. James from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela. Battling against ferocious winds in Jutland; blizzards in the Rockies; traffic jams of cyclists along the Danube; and menus in Czech, Hungarian, and...