Howard Johnson has, over the course of a 20-year career, coughed through a lot of dust clouds. The plumes of ash formed by a volcano spitting fountains of lava half a kilometre in the air. The debris kicked up by search and rescue operations following the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The smoke from protest fires in Manila. His role as a BBC News foreign correspondent took him, inevitably, to where things were happening.
Those things, usually, were extreme. “I became interested in risk and exploring that feeling of being maybe slightly closer to death,” he says. “Because, you know what everyone says, when you’re close to death, you feel most alive.”
During his career, Howard reported on an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, repressive regimes in the Philippines, prison overcrowding, terror attacks and refugee crises. When 12 boys and their football coach were trapped in an underground cave system in Thailand, Howard covered it directly from the sloppy mud outside the cave entrance.
“I found that hiking was the perfect complement to this crazy job where you would put yourself in the firing line,” he says.
“I remember coming back from Dubai in 2015 [during a period reporting from the Middle East], and the first thing I did was travel to Buttermere and hike up Haystacks. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I realised subsequently that I was grounding myself in my own earth, my own country, my own thing. It was a safe space to return to.”
Emergency exit
It’s perhaps portentous that the event which propelled him into such an adrenalised career brought him quite close to death itself. Back in 2002, he was working a corporate job after graduating in geography from Royal Holloway University. On 31 March he boarded a flight from Atlanta to Gatwick and within an hour of take-off, the plane hit a thunderstorm.
“We saw a flash of lightning and the plane started to shake,” he recalls. “The alarm went off and the crew started running up and down the aisles, looking terrified.” Up in the cockpit, the pilots had received an indication that one of the engines had caught fire and so diverted to a nearby airport and made a rapid, emergency descent.
“The plane was shaking hard because of the turbulence of the downward trajectory,” says Howard. “I remember the guy next to me just reading his book and then eventually when it got too bad, he closed his book and put it on his knee. It was like being wired up and electrocuted. I was terrified.”
The pilots dumped the plane’s fuel on the descent and, after landing, deployed the emergency chutes. “Everyone surged forward,” remembers Howard. “There was no ‘women and children first’. It was a free-for-all. You could smell the aviation fuel.
“I jumped out on the chute, landed on my bum, and ran for my life to the grass between the two runways. Looking back, I genuinely had this surge of euphoria,” he says, laughing. “I had the strains of, like, Destiny’s Child’s Survivor in my head.” That was the end for the corporate job.
“I remember feeling like I was reborn. It was crazy,” he says. “I’m not hamming it up. It really changed how I thought about everything. I thought, ‘everything has to change, because I could have died today,’ and from that point on, everything did change. It got so much better.”
World news
After that, Howard went back to university to study journalism and landed a job at the BBC. That job took him first to Japan, then Uganda, Italy, Bangladesh, India, Morocco, the USA, Jordan and on a two-year stint to the UAE. It was on a return trip home during this period that he discovered the power of walking in the hills to regain equilibrium.
“The first proper walk I did was the Coast to Coast in 2011,” he says, “and I was blown away by it. I’d spent a lot of my early career, and a lot of money, travelling around the world and I suddenly realised that places like the Lake District held this unlimited adventure.”
From that point on, he used time in the hills to rebalance the thrill and tumult of his working life, going out to the hills as regularly as he could. "I studied and love geography," he says. "Seeing the rocks and landforms I’m familiar with and feeling the air and the way it circulates in those places, I felt almost like it was cleansing me of all this crazy stuff that I was witnessing."
While home, he used his time to explore the hills of the Lakes and Dales. While away, he explored other places too, from Jebel Shams in Oman to the Ponta do Pico in the Azores.
"There’s something that happens when you start walking, this natural rhythm that kicks in," he says. "My uncle calls it motoring along. Your feet are making the decisions for you, and I feel at that point, you’re almost connected to your hunter-gatherer past."
Manila
Of all the incidents, emergencies and news stories he’s covered, when asked about the most extreme period of his career, the answer was quick.
"Working in the Philippines under the government of Rodrigo Duterte," he says. "Duterte basically styled himself on Dirty Harry, the 1970s film about a vigilante cop. He saw himself as a tough mayor from the southern Philippines, sweeping all the scum off the streets."
During his presidency, from 2016 to 2022, Duterte oversaw a merciless anti-drugs campaign that saw police forces performing summary executions in the street under the banner of suppressing the trade and use of drugs. By the end of his term, Duterte’s administration admitted to 6,252 killings, but estimates from data cited by the ICC put the number between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians.
"Some of it was based on rumour," says Howard. "It might be that you just didn’t like your neighbour. Without due process, you’re giving the power of a judge to an uneducated cop."
Howard served as the BBC’s Philippines Correspondent for five years, starting in 2017, a year after Duterte came to power. "He hated journalists, freedom of speech, human rights… basically anything that could get him in trouble," he says, "and when I arrived, I got noticed."
In 2020, Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her critical coverage of Duterte’s ‘war on drugs,’ was found guilty of cyber-libel in a case that was widely seen as politically motivated. Howard covered the case for the BBC.
"I met President Duterte’s right-hand man and gave him my business card to try to secure an interview. As I turned away, I saw him crumple it in his hand," he says. "After that, I think we developed a reputation for being a nuisance. I started to receive death threats. There was a spell when I was getting notifications of pure hatred almost non-stop."
"The thing that I found hardest about the job was that you’re seeing the worst of humanity. The worst of what people can do to each other," says Howard. "When a government goes rogue, you’re really in trouble. You damage the value system of a country, and there’s no real way of rowing it back."
The Philippines’ presidency has now passed back into the hands of the Marcos dynasty, and though violence in the streets has decreased, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) still deem it one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.
"Politics in the Philippines is bonkers. Exciting, terrifying, exhilarating, and mind-bending," says Howard. "And when I came out of it, I needed to go on a hike just to let go of it."
Adventure of a different kind
Towards the end of his time in the Philippines, another job came up, a little closer to home: foreign
correspondent for Ukraine. “I thought I might stand a good chance of getting it but decided not to
apply,” he says. “I needed a break, I couldn’t face going from one awful human situation to another.”
Instead, in the midst of BBC cutbacks, he took the option of voluntary redundancy and stepped back…
and then sort of forwards. Throughout it all, Howard had gone to the mountains to recover and this is where he went again.
He started 2023 on the summit of an ice-crusted Ben Macdui in Scotland’s Cairngorms, and a few months later filed his last report for the BBC. A week after that, he packed an ice axe, crampons and goggles and set off to begin the Cape Wrath Trail.
“My old job as a broadcast journalist was very ego driven,” he says. “And there is a certain cachet
to signing off a report with ‘Howard Johnson, BBC News’. But as I let go of that life, I started to realise how meaningless that side of it was. Whereas walking somewhere like the Cape Wrath Trail, in this vast landscape with no one around, humbles you.”
Last summer, inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s jaunt to Ynys Enlli in The Wild Places, he passed the RYA Day Skipper sailing certificate and, this year, plans to buy a boat and sail around the Scottish islands. After travelling the world in rapid response to world events, these journeys will be shorter in distance, longer in time, slower in heart rate. Personal rather than global events.
"Up on top of a mountain, you filter away all the madness and ailments of society and get to this purity,” he says. Then, pondering this after a career spent travelling and reporting on more worldly matters, he adds: “It’s as close as you can be to the rest of the universe.”
Quickfire questions
Favourite walking snack?
Clif Bar Crunchy Peanut Butter – hikers’ crack.
Perfect day in the hills?
Dawn-buster start. Walk all day. Pitch tent east-facing for sunrise. 12 hours’ zombie sleep.
Indispensable bit of kit?
My trusty Vango Nevis 100 tent. 10 years old and still going strong. Compeed is a close second.
Favourite pair of walking boots?
Arc’teryx Acrux TR GTX. That’s a company that understands less is more!
Best big walk in Britain?
I could say an obvious classic, but… London Capital Ring – a magical mystery tour of the city’s lesser-known green spaces.
Most beautiful place in the world?
Shhh! Silanguin Cove, Philippines.
Looking for more inspiration? Hear how Londoner Adriana Brownlee became the youngest woman to climb the world's 14 highest peaks.