In 1861, Hinchliff visited South America, staying with his cousin Frank Parish, the British Consul in Buenos Aires. He spent some months on extensive travels in Brazil and Argentina, with expeditions into the Serra dos Órgãos, Teresópolis, Petrópolis, and Juiz de Fora, and these were recounted in his South American Sketches of 1863. In 1873 he set off to travel around the world with a friend named William Henry Rawson, and in two years they crossed some 35,000 miles of ocean, while spending a further six months on land. Shortly after his return to England in 1875, Hinchliff was elected President of the Alpine Club, and in 1876 he published Over the Sea and Far Away, an account of his journey around the world. Describing his sad thoughts on the view of Tupungato and Aconcagua from Santiago, Hinchliff reflected that ... endless successions of men must in all probability be forever debarred from their lofty crests... those who, like Major Godwin Austen, have had all the advantages of experience and acclimatization to aid them in attacks upon the higher Himalayas, agree that 21,000 ft is near the limit at which man ceases to be capable of the slightest further exertion.