The author made the first land crossing of South America at its widest point, led twenty-four expeditions, lived with a host of exotic tribes and was awarded the Patron’s Gold Medal by the Royal Geographical Society. Hanbury-Tenison is one of the few remaining British explorers who know all the wild corners of the world.

Yet something sets him apart from those who often label themselves explorers. When he wasn’t in a jungle, Robin Hanbury-Tenison was turning his hand to helping others. He helped found Survival International to support tribal people worldwide, then created the Countryside Alliance.

Few men have lived such a life. Fewer still have written such a book.

At an age when most men would be content to rest on their laurels, restless Robin set off to cross the Sahara Desert on a camel. Accompanied by the legendary Tuareg tribesmen, the author wanted to journey not just into the silence of the great desert, but back to the roots of his own soul.

Worlds Within is full of the adventure you would expect from such a man of action. However, it is also filled with the type of rare knowledge that was revealed to other desert travellers like Lawrence, Doughty and Thesiger.

For Robin’s journey across the lonely sands freed him to write like he never has before about his life, his loves, and his travels.

The Times was right to describe Hanbury-Tenison as a great explorer. Join him now as he rides across the vast Sahara and travels within.

Although the world’s distances have shrunk before the speed of modern-day travel, there are still a surprising number of isolated people and places. Among these are the tribes of the Outer Islands of Indonesia—Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas and Irian, the Indonesian part of New Guinea.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison, whose book A Question of Survival played such a significant role in bringing the plight of Brazil’s Indians to the world’s attention, spent three months in 1973 travelling through the Outer Islands with his wife. In spite of the considerable difficulties which still faced travellers in Indonesia, once the main cities and often crowded coasts were left behind, the author reached a wide cross-section of peoples, ranging from the highly cultured Toraja of Celebes to the Dani of the Baliem Valley in New Guinea, who still use stone tools.

There are, of course, many fundamental differences between the tribes of the Outer Islands and the Indians of South America, but there are also a remarkable number of similarities. The author’s thoughtful observations on the state of the tribal peoples of Indonesia, and what the future holds for them, provide a background to a fascinating description of an area few westerners have been able to visit even at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

This book describes the author’s visit to Brazil to check whether the recommendations by the International Red Cross for the improvement of the Amazonian Indians’ lot had been implemented by the Brazilian Government. To his consternation he discovered that not only had the recommendations been largely ignored but that the whole future of these tribal peoples was being jeopardized for the sake of progress.

In return for their gift to the world of cocoa, peanuts, tomatoes, cashew, avocado and quinine, which are all of Amerindian origin, Indian tribes have received only disease, expropriation and death. They have no natural immunity to many of the diseases carried by the white man.

Civilization is fast approaching the few remaining uncontacted tribes, and A Question of Survival poses the dilemma which faces Western Civilization and all who adhere to its philosophies: that in the name of progress and technological advance we are destroying all cultures in any way different from our own, even though they constitute the roots from which we have sprung, and without which our own stability and sense of continuity is threatened.

It is, therefore, not just a question of survival for the South American Indian that the author is raising, but, by implication, the survival of us all as a species.