Book description
For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn't mean sitting at home
waiting for renaissances, enlightenments and easyJet. It meant
travelling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries on, Tim
Mackintosh-Smith's passionate pursuit of the fourteenth-century
traveller takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid
Indian Ocean ports and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan
sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar
to the Alhambra ( via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania and
Guinea ) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls
'IB' - a man who out-travelled Marco Polo by a factor of three, who
spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an
intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim's journey is a search
for survivals from IB's world - material, human, spiritual, edible -
however, w hen your fellow traveller has a 700-year head start, familiar
notions don't always work.
