In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta

Travels with a Tangerine | Other travelogues

Travels with a Tangerine

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, editor of the recent excerpted version of Gibb also wrote his own Rihla.

Amazon UK. Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Although this book won the prestigious Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award, it isn't available in the U.S. I did, however, see it at the Globe Corner Bookstore in Cambridge, MA, and, sure enough the Globe Corner Website has it.

"Following the Path of a Medieval Arab Wanderer" by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times. Has great detail on khat-chewing.

A wonderful review by Karen Dabrowska quoting a great passage on one of my favorite towns, Alanya:

"Mediterranean Turkey was doubly foreign. I seemed to have entered one where they spoke an entirely different cultural language - a sort of Euro-Tuetonic. Most of the tourists in Alanya were ur Germans but even some Turkish visitors affected rimless spectacles and gemutlich lapdogs. Sauerkraut was served with everything; every other building seemed to be a disco. One night club, the Whiskey Go Go, offered `Sex on the Beach'. To be fair, it was not an activity but a pop group; but it seemed to sum up the ineffable crassitude of the place. Where was the Alanya of IB? Gone."

For more on Alanya see my site Alanya, Turkey on the Web.

Mirabilis.ca blog. Excerpts IraqiPapers.com.

Short review in the Contemporary Review July, 2001.

Other travelogues

On ibn Batuta's trail: A Photographic Travellogue by Sandeep Akkeraju. Akkeraju didn't go everywhere Battuta did, but he hit Mali and Morroco, Tanzania and Egypt--and he took a lot of pictures. If you're interested in Batuta per se see Akkeraju's good, medium-length A bit 'bout Batuta, also available in PDF format. Concluding comments have cynical political edge, including the ringing cry "not Jihad and not Liberty."