While waiting for the result of his Foreign Office exams, Rodd visited Trebartha Hall in Cornwall and went walking on the local moors. He wrote to Irene of the impact they had on him, indicating that earlier holidays in Cornwall had inspired his love of nature:

This suggests that while the desert had begun to stir Rodd's imagination, it also reinforced in him feelings about the outdoor life that had existed before 1914. In having a common love of the Sahara and south-west England, Rodd was similar to Ralph Bagnold. Bagnold was drawn to the landscapes of both Dartmoor and Egypt, as he explained in his memoirs: ‘Egypt fascinated me from the start, just as Dartmoor had done when I was a boy. Both had the strange aura induced by the physical presence of the remote past and also great, bare, trackless expanses where the careless might well get lost.’

When Rodd joined the Foreign Office, Hardinge was permanent undersecretary. He was succeeded in November 1920 by the tough-minded Eyre Crowe, a German specialist who had organised the blockade against Germany during the First World War. Rodd's first position was chargé d’affairs in Rome – a posting that he called a ‘compliment’ to his father. It was a role that consolidated his interest in North Africa, for the remit of his work involved monitoring Libya. The summer of 1919 found him reading about the nomads of Tripolitania. During the following year, he worked on the section of the embassy's annual report on the Italian colonies, which covered developments in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. He visited Tunis and Tripoli in January 1920 and then returned the following month, this time taking in the main coastal cities of Libya and venturing south to some of the towns of the interior.