In the last 40 years of his life Ian Hibell pedalled, pushed or carried his bicycle more than 250,000 miles around the world through almost every kind of terrain, however remote and inhospitable.

Between 1971 and 1973 he made the first overland journey by bicycle from Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America to the northwesternmost point of Alaska.

The hardest part of this arduous 18,000-mile expedition was the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia where the Pan-American Highway stops at the Atrato swamp. Other travellers skirt it by boat, but Hibell, and his two Kiwi companions, Gary Bishop and John Bakewell, hacked their way straight across with machetes, dragging their bikes through a bog that was sometimes chest deep.

They travelled little more than a mile each day, and slept above the water in hammocks. When they emerged nearly four weeks later at Travesía, Panama — with trench foot, boils and, in Hibell’s case, a septic machete wound — they met the British explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who was preparing to lead a British Army expedition south across the Darien, fully equipped with off-road vehicles and boats.

There was little outward sign of Hibell’s tenacity. He was a small, polite man who was modest about his achievements. He was born in Cheam, Surrey, in 1934, and even as a small child he showed a taste for travel, on one occasion escaping the family garden in his pedal car and having to be retrieved from the other side of town by the police.

His curiosity about the rest of the world was fuelled rather than assuaged by his period of National Service with the RAF. He went on a tour of Iceland with the Cyclists’ Touring Club — which, along with its US counterpart, the League of American Bicyclists — would later elect him an honorary member.

Hibell worked for Standard Telephones and Cables for some years but his heart was elsewhere and he regularly returned late from his annual leaves. In 1963 his employers offered him a year’s sabbatical. He accepted the offer and never went back. His ten-year trip across North America, South-East Asia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and back to the Americas began in St John’s, Newfoundland. He planned initially to cycle to the Pacific coast. He had £140 in cash, no map, and despite the dirt roads he would encounter, a conventional drop-handlebar touring bicycle — which in later years he upgraded with a sturdier carrier rack.

“I was born so far back that mountain bikes hadn’t even been invented,” he recalled. He avoided many mechanical problems by travelling lightly, carrying little more than a tent, a paraffin stove, clothes and provisions.

During his travels he often took temporary jobs to finance his further explorations. Given the distances that he travelled, often on remote routes, near-misses were inevitable. In Taiwan he was caught in a landslide in which boulders bounced over his head. Travelling through the islands in Indonesia, he visited Komodo to look for the dragons and instead contracted a near-fatal bout of malaria.

Yet his travels were great adventures too. He dined with Dayaks in Borneo, where he was surprised to be offered a packet of biscuits with the supermarket label still on. He attended the funeral of a cannibal chief, and on another occasion he was entertained by Inuit.

His ten-year odyssey made Hibell something of a celebrity in Britain. He appeared on Blue Peter in 1975 and told its viewers how he survived in the wild with his bike. He gave lectures on his travels throughout the UK and the US. His memoir, Into the Remote Places, was published in 1984.

His next great trip was the “other” end-to-end, from Nordkapp, the northernmost tip of Norway, to Cape Town in South Africa in 1975-76, crossing the Sahara alone en route.

Back on the lecture circuit after this trip he was approached by Laura Nicholls, a cyclist 20 years his junior. She wanted to travel; he fell in love with her, and they cycled together through Peru and Brazil from 1978 until 1979. Their union produced a son, but they did not stay together, and Hibell remained a bachelor.

He confessed that his trips sometimes struck him as pointless, and he decided that on his 1982-83 trip through Africa he would raise money for the Spastics Society (now Scope), for which he had worked for a year in the 1980s. He became so ill with a tropical disease in Zambia that the embassy made preparations to fly his corpse home. He recovered, however, and continued the journey, eventually raising around £10,000 for Scope.

In later years Hibell’s travels were curtailed when he became a full-time carer for his elderly mother. His desire for travel never left him, however, and when his mother died he set off again. In 2006, at the age of 72, he reached Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast, having cycled there from Rotterdam via South-East Asia and China.

The typescript of a further volume of his memoirs, provisionally entitled Four Days at Ragged Point, is in the hands of a publisher.

Hibell was cycling from Britain to Athens — what he called a “training trip” for a journey to Tibet — when he was killed, only ten miles from the capital, by a hit-and-run motorist.

Ian Hibell, globetrotting cyclist, was born on January 6, 1934. He died in a road accident on August 23, 2008, aged 74