In 1959 he fell in with a group of Provençal shepherds and went with them on the transhumance, herding three thousand sheep from their winter pasture to summer pasture in the French Alps. He then taught English in Casablanca, and in 1961 was the photographer on Oxford University's Marco Polo Expedition, travelling four months overland on a pair of BSA motorcycles and sidecar with Stanley Johnson and Tim Severin to Afghanistan and India. The adventure led to the publication of Severin's 1964 book "Tracking Marco Polo" with photographs by de Larrabeiti.