History with a bit of charm

On a summer’s day in 1325, Ibn Battutah set out from his home in Tangier (in present day Morocco) on a pilgrimage to Mecca. It would be another 29 years before he returned to the city of his birth. In those three decades, he would travel across most of the known world and write a travelogue that would establish his reputation as the most famous Arab traveller of all time.

Around six and a half centuries later, Tim Mackintosh-Smith was eating a boiled potato on a street in Sana’a, Yemen when his neighbour (Mackintosh-Smith had been living in the country at the time for almost two decades) asked him: “Where does the word batatah, potato, come from?” The neighbour suggested that it is from the root of Ibn Battutah’s name — batatah/battutah.

Mackintosh-Smith was not convinced and wondered if his neighbour was pulling his leg. He went into the Greater Yemen Bookshop the same day and, along with a book on Yemeni history, bought Ibn Battutah’s Travels. Or to give it its full title translated from the original Arabic: The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel.

A gossipy journey

Mackintosh-Smith began reading Ibn Battutah’s Travels immediately. He was highly entertained by the gossipy nature of Ibn Battutah’s reminiscences of the many lands he’d wandered through and the strange people and customs he encountered. What spoke to him, though, was the fact that even 600 years later, he could find tangible evidence of the world that Ibn Battutah had travelled.

There was, among his Yemeni acquaintances, a direct descendant of one of the noblemen mentioned in the Travels. History, in a sense, was still living, voices from long ago still seemed to echo in so many of these places. Inspired, Mackintosh-Smith set off in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah to see how much of the world that existed in the 14th century was still there to be re-discovered and explored. He would eventually write a trilogy of travelogues of which Travels with a Tangerine would be the first instalment. In this volume, which was first published in 2001, Mackintosh-Smith took on the first stage of Ibn Battutah’s journey — from Tangier to Constantinople. The Arab had spent half a lifetime travelling and clocked up 75,000 miles on his expedition.

Modern logistics and the pressures of time meant that this present-day adventure would have to be broken up to more achievable goals.

If Ibn Battutah, quoted directly in the pages of this book, is a warm and curious guide to the world of the 1300s, Mackintosh-Smith is his equal in empathy and humour in capturing the wonder and ridiculousness of our own time. Travels with a Tangerine is a classic of travel literature. Like all the legendary English travel writers before him, Mackintosh-Smith conjures up images infused with historical detail in the most charming prose. To read his eloquent contemplations of both Ibn Battutah and accounts of lands and people six centuries apart is to revel in the beauty of language and reflect on the truth of why we travel: to see in others a reflection of ourselves and our shared humanity.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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