An episodic account of cycle journeys made in the early 1970s
across the Darien gap, south through Africa (including the Sahara)
and west-east across South America from Lima to Recife in Brazil
Hibell is accorded a high plinth indeed among adventurous
cycle tourists. He is cited approvingly by everyone from Josie
Dew to Bernard
Magnaloux and copies of this book are now reputed to change hands
for hundreds of pounds. It is a deserved reputation. Into The Remote Places
recounts adventures of spectacular audacity – most notably crossing
the Darien Gap and the Sahara.
Since
his untimely death, obiturists have adopted a kind of short hand to describe his
most extraordinary moments: ‘rescued from certain death in the desert by
Tuareg tribesmen, chased by spear wielding Turkana in northern Kenya and savaged
by soldier ants in South America’. Taken alone, the Boys Own adventures would
make this book worth reading. But its really special quality is Hibell’s
self-effacing, humble attitude to himself. He paints himself as a very ordinary
man, doing extraordinary things, without his modesty ever seeming false. Possibly
it is this that makes it easy to project yourself into his cycle shoes –
even if you are never actually going to pedal further than the shops.
He
paints some vivid pictures of the scenes that he has encountered too. Here he
is when he found himself amid a herd of elephants:
“Now
there were currents of elephants; streams that flowed this way that that. I was
a rowing boat in the midst of a regatta, a wheelchair patient negotiating the
M1 on a bank holiday weekend. I sought and found the protection of another tree
and pressing myself up against its rough bark, closed my eyes.”
Or,
having a hard time of it in the Sahara:
“Three days. 147 kilometres. The afternoons were interminable.
Dullness overpowered me. I might have been walking on the moon; for all
I knew the day’s journey took ten years. Only at the ransom of my
other faculties could I put one foot out before the other. And even then
I would count, very slowly to one hundred. By that time my dizziness would
have disappeared and I would get to my feet and stagger on.”
There are also interesting reflections from an
age now long passed. His sympathies for general set up in Rhodesia, as it then
was, are illuminating given his liberal instincts and his long immersion in the
rest of Africa.
The book is not without its curiosities.
Hibell makes his final journey with ‘Jean’, a young woman he met at
a lecture he was giving in the UK between his journeys in Africa and Peru. Love
blossoms between them, but when ‘Jean’ returns to Britain early, Hibell
starts to pine. And before he has reached, the Atlantic she has written to him
to let him know that she was pregnant. Hibell is delighted and happily starts
to fantasise about family life, marriage and a simple cottage with a door framed
by rambling roses.
This does give the end of his narrative
a very strong, human conclusion. But it also sits rather oddly in a travel book
of this kind. Indeed, in the age of the internet it is almost impossible not to
seek out further instalments. This turns up any number of gems – not least
Hibell’s appearance of Blue Peter.
It also becomes clear, however, that the relationship did
not thrive and the author was soon in search of yet more remote places.
It
is a bittersweet revelation. The human desire for a happy ending is unfulfilled;
but, hero Hibell, the unassuming global circumnavigator, emerges intact from the
clutches of domesticity.
