UPON reaching the age of 88, most people would be forgiven for wanting to put their feet up and have a hard earned rest.

But not Derek Francis, of Malvern Link, a globetrotter who has just embarked on a trip to South America, his latest expedition around the world.

Mr Francis, a furniture store owner, is travelling through northern Argentina and the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, known as the driest place in the world, with wife Susan.

The trip is one of scores that he has made since his first foreign excursion, to France in 1947 on a Vincent 1,000cc motorcycle.

“It was just after the war,” he recalled. “The roads were heavily bomb-cratered and the bridges were all Bailey bridges.”

Subsequently, he went to the USA with a friend, saw sights like the Grand Canyon, and became interested in slide photography, especially of wildlife, a love he retains to this day.

It saw him travel with a BBC wildlife team to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the mid-60s, and since then to most of the world’s exotic locales and obscure habitats, with no continent and only a few countries left unvisited.

Among the places he has visited have been the Galapagos Islands, famous for their central place within Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution.

“This was in 1973-4, when very few people went there at all,” he said.

Other highlights of his globetrotting career include horseback safaris in Kenya, Himalaya treks, a trip to the Rann of Kutch in India, and visits to Borneo, Mauritius and Alaska.

All this time he was taking pictures, and he has now accumulated a vast archive of images of these far-off places and their flora and fauna.

He has used these to put together numerous slideshows over the years for presentations to various clubs and societies.

In 1992, he married Susan, who shared his love of wildlife photography, and almost immediately they were off to the Antarctic, where they spent three weeks sailing around the ice-bound continent.

Since then they have continued to travel, visiting Australia and the western deserts of Egypt, climbing Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and setting foot on Kamchatka in the very far east of Russia, to mention a few.

The Nyiragongo volcano and Borneo are other favourites.

As if all this travelling was not enough, Mr Francis found time to become a champion endurance horse rider, becoming national champion in his younger days, and coming out of retirement only four years ago to compete again.

The couple’s travels have resulted in practical action to help save the often-endangered habitats and species they have encountered, as some years ago they founded the Francis Of Malvern Wildlife Fund, which has given tens of thousands of pounds to wildlife charities over the past few years.

“It’s endlessly fascinating – it brings home to you how important it is to preserve these environments,”

said Mr Francis.