John Hillaby; Writer Toured the World on Foot

John Hillaby, whose string of popular travel books began in 1964 with “Journey to the Jade Sea,” an account of a walk to Lake Turkana in Kenya, has died. He was 69.

Hillaby, who lived at York in northern England, died Saturday, his family said. He had suffered from osteoarthritis, a painful, progressive swelling and stiffening of the joints, since 1993.

Hillaby estimated that he had walked the equivalent of three times around the world in his life--a total distance of about 74,700 miles.

“Journey to the Jade Sea,” which got its name from the lake’s color, involved a 1,100-mile, round-trip walk across desert and mountains with a camel team. His vivid descriptions of wild places, laced with notes on animals and plants, anthropology, folklore, personal problems and encounters along the route made fascinating reading.

Hillaby repeated the technique in books on walks through Britain, France, Greece, the United States and elsewhere.

“How I came to get a brick thrown at me in a peaceful place like Holland was due to my own stupidity,” Hillaby intriguingly wrote in his book “A Walk Through Europe” in 1972, “but I couldn’t have foreseen all that happened that day, certainly not an encounter with an elk at the foot of a huge highway cloverleaf intersection.”

A former Times book critic called Hillaby’s books “compelling,” adding: “He walks through the land but in a sense the land walks through him. A walk for John Hillaby may be in history, recent or past, in geography, in art, in botany or biology.”

A tall, gaunt man with a gray beard and silvery hair, Hillaby kept to back roads and footpaths wherever possible, denouncing highways as “the sewers of modern civilization.”

He is survived by two daughters and his third wife.