Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah finds Tim Mackintosh-Smith utilising his impressive knowledge of Arabic studies in a fascinating journey to find the real Arabia. As he recounted in his previous book, Yemen: The Unknown Arabia, which won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award in 1998, Mackintosh-Smith came to all this by way of Oxford, where he became so fascinated by Arabic that he went to Yemen to improve his understanding and speech. Mackintosh-Smith, who has made the Yemeni capital his home for the past two decades, first encountered Ibn Battutah in the Greater Yemen bookshop in Sana'a. “I wasn't looking for him: it was a chance encounter - better, as the saying goes, than a thousand appointments.”

Spiritual backpacker, temporary hermit and failed ambassador, Ibn Battutah braved brigands and his own prejudices. The outcome was a monumental book on The Wonders of Wandering and the Marvels of Metropolises, in short, The Travels. In it, the Englishman found that the great wanderer had ‘escaped pirates, storms and shipwre-cks,’ ‘dodged the Black Death’ and ‘survived the near-fatal consequences of undercooked yams’. He was also employed by the Sultan of Delhi, who, Mackintosh-Smith remarks, had “bumped off his father in a Buster Keaton-style collapsing pavilion operated by elephants.”

Captivated by this inquisitive, indefatigable man, Mackintosh-Smith sets out to write a 'tail', or continuation of the original train of writing.

Travels with a Tangerine follows the first stage of the Moroccan's journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Ibn Battutah, the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, 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, travelling three times the distance Marco Polo allegedly covered.

In his quest, Mackintosh-Smith discovers some places on Ibn Battutah's itinerary that seem to have altered so little in the past six and a half centuries that the changes he does observe are jarring or even comical. In Oman, “the exhausting business of going to the cafe to gossip has been superseded by. the GSM – mobile telephone,” and in Dhofar, where people still believe in witches, he hears of mountain men clad in nothing but indigo loincloths, who take plastic cards from their dagger sheaths and extract money from cash machines. Destinations include an Assasin castle in Syria, the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea and some of the greatest cities of medieval Islam.

The resulting text is a combination: a disciple's experience in search of his long dead hero and an intelligent visitor's description of modern life in the areas he visits. The writing, spare and elegant, makes this a highly compelling read, for the adventurer or the armchair traveller.