Travels with a Tangerine

£7.99

This isn't another piece of travel literature concerned with buying a small holding in Spain, Italy or France and pursuing some horticultural dream.
Rather Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a previous winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, follows the journey of possibly the greatest traveller of all time, Ibn Battutah, or IB as he is affectionately referred to.

Ibn Battutah set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on the pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned 29 years later, he had visited most of the known world and spent half a lifetime covering some 75,000 miles.
This text follows his footsteps, covering the first stage of his journey from Tangier to Constantinople and exploring both the 14th century and its parallel landscape: the contemporary Muslim world.

Needless to say travelling in the early fourteenth century was not straight forward, and the trail proceeds via the Nile Delta, Northern Syria, Oman, and Dhofar before heading for Anatolia, the Crimea and finally ending up at Constantinople. As Mackintosh-Smith makes clear he has left gaps in IB's itinerary as he doesn't have a spare 30 years.

The writer studied Classical Arabic at Oxford, and his cultural and historical references are fairly awesome.