Robin Hanbury-Tenison OBE

Robin Hanbury-Tenison is a joint-founder of Survival International, the NGO that supports tribal peoples, and its President. Named by the Sunday Times in 1984 as ‘the greatest explorer of the past 20 years’, he has embarked on countless expeditions.

Perhaps the most significant of these was Royal Geographical Society’s largest, in which Hanbury-Tenison led a team of 115 scientists into the rainforests of Sarawak, Borneo.

Hanbury-Tenison has a number of firsts to his name. In 1957, he became the first person to travel overland from London to Ceylon – or Sri Lanka as it’s now known. The following year he completed the first land crossing of South America at its widest point and in 1964-65 achieved the first river crossing of the same continent, from north to south. Then there are the slightly wackier claims – the first to navigate the Orinoco by hovercraft and the first to cover the length of the Great Wall of China on horseback.

Exploration remains close to his heart. He doesn’t take the oft-held view that you can’t be an explorer now that the globe has been mapped, saying, "Anyone can and should call themselves an explorer if what they are doing is seeking to understand and change the world in some arduous physical way". And his favourite method is to travel by horse, taking traditional transport, just as his hero Wilfred Thesiger would have done, to deepen the experience. He explains, "On foot with a pack you see nothing but your feet. In a car, you are insulated from the real world. But on a horse, you have an intelligent animal doing all of the work and most of the thinking, leaving you free to look and listen, to communicate with those you meet."

More recently he held the post of chief executive with the British Field Sports Society, which became the Countryside Alliance, from 1995 to 1998, knowing the position may make him the ‘most unpopular person in Britain’. However, he was successful in garnering support at the 1997 Hyde Park Rally and again at the 1998 Countryside March, in which 300,000 people protested peacefully – the largest protest of its kind ever at the time.

Unsurprisingly, Hanbury-Tenison has picked up numerous awards for his work and achievements, too long to list here, but among them a Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society and an OBE.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison is the author of:

• Land of Eagles
• The Seventy Great Journeys in History
• White Horses Over France
• Chinese Adventure - A Ride Along the Great Wall
• Fragile Eden-A Ride Through New Zealand
• Spanish Pilgrimage
• The Rough and The Smooth
• A Question of Survival
• A Pattern of Peoples
• Mulu: The Rainforest
• Worlds Apart - An Explorer’s Life
• Worlds Within-Reflection in the Sand
• The Oxford Book of Exploration