Books and publications by John Hare
Entrusting his life to a colourful cast of companions - an unreformed poacher and a murderous driver among them - John Hare braves bandit attacks, ferocious sandstorms which dissipate his herd of domestic camels, shares a wild camel calf’s first few hours, tracks the equally endangered Gobi bear and happens upon previously undiscovered Tu Ying, an outpost of the ancient city of Lou Lan.
With the conservation of the wild camel in mind, John Hare was inspired to venture with domestic Bactrian camels, Chinese scientists and Kazakh herdsmen into the wildest parts of the Chinese Gobi on expeditions which led them across hundreds of miles of sand dunes, unexplored in recent history. Several weeks into one journey, Hare and his team discovered an unmapped valley deep in the dunes where a fresh water source had ensnared a population of wildlife, which had never encountered man.
This book starts out with a journey of daring exploration and culminates in a catastrophic man-made disaster.
The first part records John Hare and his team’s circumambulation of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya with dromedary camels, a feat never before recorded. It was accomplished in temperatures which at one point reached 60.1° Celsius.
I was the last recruit into the Colonial Administrative Service in Northern Nigeria – hence the title of this book. My years 1957 to 1964 coincided with a time of momentous change in Nigeria, a colony when I arrived, it was an independent state when I left, just before a military coup and the onset of the Biafran war.
Published by IB Tauris (1) **The Mysteries of the Gobi (2009) Published by Little Brown (1) **The Lost Camels of Tartary (hbk and pbk) 1998 **Also in German translation (Scherz and National Geographic), Estonian and Chinese Published by Constable and Robinson (1) Shadows across the Sahara (2002) Also in German…