Meet the Times reader with more passport stamps than the Travel desk - The Times

Times readers are a remarkably well-travelled bunch. But one subscriber in particular caught the attention of the Travel editors — and his fellow readers — recently with his worldly adventures. 

The retired management consultant John Hinde, 60, regularly shares below-the-line links to his impressive collection of amateur travel photographs, from trips to all sorts of places, from a tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal caves in Belize to a jaunt around southern Finland and a solo trip to Guatemala. Whenever we publish a travel story in The Times or The Sunday Times, Hinde seems to have got to the destination before us — and he has the photographs to prove it, which you can find in the online comments section at the bottom of the article. 

Hinde’s photography and unique travel stories have garnered him a small fanbase among subscribers and staff, which is why we wanted to find out more about his trips — and showcase some of his best photographs from his decades spent exploring the world. 

Now London-based, Hinde grew up in Kent as the oldest child of a Portuguese mother and a British father who often told him stories of his own travels, including a 1963 solo road trip from Baghdad to Birmingham in an Alvis car. But it was another keen adventurer who really kick-started Hinde’s desire to see the world: “I was an avid fan of Tintin,” he says.

Childhood holidays took him to Spain, France and Portugal, but it was in early adulthood that he began to expand his travel repertoire, venturing to Peru with a university friend in 1987 and on a month-long solo trip to India and Nepal in 1996. 

Hinde became interested in photography in his teens and early twenties, inspired by carefully composed photos taken by his father on a Leica M3 camera. He would go on to purchase his own Leica in Hong Kong as an adult, followed by his first digital camera in 2004. These days Hinde uses a Leica M11 camera, still employing the same 35mm and 50mm lenses he bought 30 years ago.

Hinde has now travelled to 90 countries and hopes to have visited 100 by the end of 2027. He has no children and spends much of his free time planning his travels (“almost as fun as the trip itself”), travelling (either solo, with friends, or occasionally on organised group tours) and documenting his pictures on the photography sharing website Flickr. 

A Times subscriber for decades, he only began sharing his photos in the online comments section in recent years. “Sharing pictures that my friends and online communities can respond to is wonderful,” he says. “I love the idea of being able to inspire other readers’ travels, and I welcome their feedback.” And while many Times readers also share their travel stories and recommendations in the comments section, it’s Hinde who always seems to have a recent photo album at the ready.

Of the most memorable places he’s visited over the decades, Hinde says he found Peru (1987), Kenya (1990), the Philippines (1997), Cambodia (1999), Myanmar (2010) and Colombia (2016) most impactful. More recently, he says, a 2025 visit to the Serapeum of Saqqara in Egypt, 19 miles south of Cairo, was mind-blowing. 

“I’d heard so much about the pyramids, but the Serapeum of Saqqara, with its 24 colossal bull sarcophagi carved in granite and basalt, which had been moved underground into precise locations with baffling, laser-like precision, blew me away. I went in having not heard about it and came out shaking my head in disbelief about how on earth they had done that thousands of years ago.”

Recalling a solo visit to Cambodia in 1999, Hinde says: “There was very little infrastructure at the time; the road into Phnom Penh was still dusty, and you could feel the lasting effects of the horrors of Khmer Rouge [the genocide had ended two decades earlier]. I remember being struck by how young the average age was and how so many people had lost their parents. 

“I travelled by speedboat from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, a small town back then, and experienced the beauty of Angkor Wat for three days with hardly anyone else there. I had spent some time in Thailand, and Cambodia was so different but yet so exciting. I couldn’t wait to go back.”

Hinde says visiting India for the first time in 1996 was another unforgettable trip. “I can still remember the intense heat, being able to have a full meal for 24p, the dust, cows on the road, seeing bodies burning by the Ganges — then thrown into the water, and people brushing their teeth with sticks in the same river. The smells, the colours… everywhere you looked it was like nothing I had ever seen before.”

Buenos Aires is his favourite city in the world (“great architecture, fantastic food, vibrant and diverse neighbourhoods, rich history, and a slightly edgy vibe”). Riyadh is his least favourite. He visited for his work as a technology consultant just before he retired in 2020, and found there was “very little beauty, with lots of dust everywhere”. But he got the sense then that “change was coming”, and that young people had “little time for the extreme views of the past”. 

Inevitably, travelling so often, things sometimes go wrong. Hinde’s travel low points include “forgetting about basic security in Havana in 2001” — an experience that entailed keeping his wallet in his back pocket and losing all of his cards and $200 in cash. “Lesson learnt that being able to sustain a cash flow despite hazards such as lost phones and cards on long trips is critical.”

At the time of writing Hinde was travelling around North Macedonia and Kosovo. He has now visited all ten of the smallest countries in Europe, and hopes to have visited 100 sovereign countries soon. Top of his wish list? “Antarctica, the South Sea Islands and the Caribbean, as I’ve only been to Cuba. I’d also love to visit the Stans, particularly Turkmenistan, hopefully next year.”

He plans to keep travelling for as long as he’s able to, and no doubt you’ll be seeing photographs of his forthcoming trips in our comment section soon.

And we’d love to highlight other readers’ travel photography too. Send us your recent travel highlights — and accompanying photographs — to travelnewsletter@thetimes.co.uk for a chance to be featured.