John is one of Britain’s most experienced explorers and public speakers. In 1983, after journeys in Africa and Latin America, he made a 500-mile solo crossing of the western Nepal Himalaya, and told the story in his first book, Into Thin Air. His interest in Asia grew further with the opening in 1986 of the border between Pakistan and China, making it possible – for the first time in 40 years – to retrace virtually the whole of the Silk Road. He was one of the first modern travellers to do so, and wrote about the journey in An Adventure on the Old Silk Road. This was followed in 1991 by An Englishman in Patagonia, recounting eight months in this enigmatic southern tip of South America.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he became one of the first Western journalists to report from the new Central Asian republics. In the 1990s he also explored the hidden Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh, and investigated the deaths in Bolivia of the US outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the early 2000s he mapped the source of the Mekong, and walked the 1,600-mile Royal Road of the Incas through the Andes of Ecuador and Peru, one of only five people in modern times to do so.
In 2006 he turned his attention to the Sahara, and joined a camel caravan carrying salt for 450 miles from the mines of Taoudenni to Timbuktu. In 2009 he spent six months in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, countries he says “are in the news for all the wrong reasons”. In a sequel to this dangerous trip, he made a further journey in 2011 from Georgia to Afghanistan and China.
In 2013 he followed up a longstanding interest in the Balkans by travelling from Trieste to Istanbul, the subject of his acclaimed talk A Balkan Adventure. In 2015 he crossed disputed borders in Ukraine, Russia and the breakaway states of the Caucasus, and gives some surprising insights in Russia’s Secret Corners. Most recently, he has marked 2018’s 150th anniversary of an extraordinary British rescue mission to Abyssinia, by exploring the route in an adventure which he describes in his much anticipated latest talk, To Eritrea and Ethiopia: Retracing a Victorian Expedition.
People are always at the centre of his story-telling. His BBC Radio 4 programmes have won him several appearances on Pick of the Week, and one on Pick of the Year. He’s also contributed to Radio 4’s Excess Baggage and From Our Own Correspondent, and writes occasionally for Geographical magazine. But it’s for his thought-provoking, beautifully illustrated talks that people know him best. He has spoken to over 1,000 audiences in six countries, and in 2006 received the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)’s Ness Award for his work in popularising geography and the wider understanding of the world.
Among other things, John was for many years on the judging panel of the annual BBC/Royal Geographical Society Journey of a Lifetime Award, and is a patron of the Southampton and Winchester Visitors Group, which works with and campaigns for refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK, especially those based in Hampshire. He’s a past president of the Guildford Travel Club, and since 2010 has been president of the Globetrotters Club. In 2012 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2016 he became a patron of the Friends of Whitchurch Silk Mill in Hampshire, where his Silk Road journey began more than 35 years ago. In 2023 he became a patron of the Hampshire History Trust. And since way back in 1995 he’s been a weartester for Rohan Designs, during which time he’s managed to lose so many hats that in 2010 the company named one after him.
People often ask how his travelling began. “I was always mad about maps,” he says. “I used to pore over the school atlas, dreaming about romantic-sounding names like the Hindu Kush and the Mountains of the Moon. In my twenties I got the chance to visit some of those places, and they weren’t at all as I’d imagined. So I realised that travel was about re-thinking my ideas.”
His favourite school subject was geography – especially the human angle – and after taking a degree in this at Cambridge he went on to study town planning at Oxford Polytechnic, the forerunner to Oxford Brookes University. Having grown up in the 1960s, he’s fascinated by how planners responded to the conditions of the time. “What on earth made us think like that?” he asks. Luckily the office work didn’t put a stop to his travels, and in 1989 he gave up the day job and started doing what he does today.
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