It was one of the great treks of the 1970s and yet it had an inauspicious beginning. Dick McCowan Hill was just 22 in 1975 when he decided to embark on a bus trip to sub-Saharan Africa with a group of friends, and they had grand dreams of venturing into another world from their Aberdeen roots.
However, their big adventure nearly stalled before it had begun. On the first few miles of the journey, Hill was pulled over by Grampian police at Dyce and asked to explain what he was doing. As he recounted the preparations — which involved the transformation of a 1947 Bedford bus, bought for £75, into an early Winnebago prototype — a stern officer simply asked: “But where’s the tax disc?”
He looked dumbfounded and blurted out: “But we’re all going to Africa . . .”
“Not without a tax disc, you’re not,” responded the officer.
Yet, in the months that followed, the group negotiated myriad obstacles and pitfalls as they covered 28,000 miles in the bus, equipped with a new engine, cooker, fridge, running water and customised petrol tank. It summed up the adventurous spirit of Hill, who had graduated the previous year from Aberdeen University with a diploma in agriculture, but possessed a wanderlust from an early age.
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That inspired him and five colleagues to fulfil a schoolboy dream of tackling the Odyssean trip through Africa.
They journeyed through the Sahara, Niger, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and Zaire, where their progress was halted by civil war, and eventually on to southern Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and what was then Rhodesia, until they arrived at the South African border — where they were denied entry because they had run out of money.
Astrid Taylor, the youngest of the group, recalled: “We didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for, but Dick was such a larger-than-life character and had such boundless enthusiasm. He kept the whole show on the road. The party put the bus on a boat while travelling through the Central African Republic, and we were on the river for 20 days, surrounded by crocodiles, monkeys and other animals. One of the group contracted malaria.”
The bus troop found a good Samaritan who allowed them to park in his garden for two weeks until money arrived and they got to Cape Town — eight months after they had set out.
Certainly, nothing fazed Hill, who subsequently became a tireless campaigner for animal rights and conservation causes during his peripatetic life, which ended at the age of 63 when he suffered a heart attack. He came home to Aberdeen in the 1980s for a stint on the oil rigs before returning to what had become Zimbabwe, where he was employed as a long-distance truck driver, an agronomist and as a hotelier, canoe safari operator and safari investor.
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As another confrère said: “Dick was a Scotsman, a Scottish rugby supporter, a Burns Night convener, a kilt wearer, a haggis eater, a Billy Connolly lover and occasional whisky drinker.
“A constant and humble man, who loved nothing more than to be with friends or making new friends. He did not see class or position in people.”
He also became a Zimbabwean citizen; an immigrant who was one of the locals. He married Anne, a Zimbabwean, and they had a daughter Savannah. They bought their house and land in Kariba and promoted tourism to the country. The excesses of the Mugabe regime meant this became a fraught business, but when he could no longer get work in Kariba, he became a crocodile farmer in Mozambique for 12 years — earning himself the nickname “Crocodile Aberdeen” — before retiring in 2012.
He was passionate about his voluntary work at Kariba Animal Welfare Fund Trust. Unsung, unpaid, but unfailingly reliable, he rose at 5.30am most days to feed the buffaloes, hyenas, crocodiles, and he was a tireless remover of snares.
He never shied away from challenging the illegal activities of poachers and flung himself into conservation wherever it was required. But he was never po-faced or pious about it. As his friend Hannes Wessels said: “Some sort of inner peace always welled out of him in the form of a sparkling smile, a beer in hand and a bellyful of laughter.
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“He thrilled us with his love of life, his family and his friends and we craved the comfort of the warmth we felt when we were near him.”
Friends recalled that the turn-off to the Hill home at Makuti was always a relief from the main road, with the anticipation of a corpulent, bearded, beaming Scotsman standing on the lawn of his estate waiting to greet weary travellers, who certainty knew good times were ahead.
Dick McCowan Hill, conservationist and adventurer, was born on May 11, 1953. He died on April 27, 2017, aged 63