One of the best travel writers around! ( )

Travels with a Tangerine takes us back to the year 1325 when the "greatest Islamic traveler" Ibn Battutah departed from Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 21 years old. There is nothing astonishing about someone wanting to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is so remarkable is where Ibn Battutah ended up. The trip took him almost thirty years and 75,000 miles. He spent his life on the road. At the same age, author Mackintosh-Smith sets out to follow in IB's footsteps, admittedly taking short cuts because he doesn't want to spend his entire life on this journey. But the result of this fascination is an interesting look back at the Arabic fourteenth century with eye an toward the future. Mackintosh-Smith's humor makes it an easy read. ( )

"Inverse archaeology", 19 Jun. 2016

This review is from: Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (Paperback)
This book had been sitting on my 'to read' shelf for a couple of years: I didn't think it would be particularly interesting.
When I determinedly sat down to read it, I realised what I'd been missing as this is travel writing at its absolutely superb best. In it the author - an Arabist and longterm Yemeni resident - seeks to follow the travels of 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, a man who over twenty-nine years visited "over forty countries on the modern map, travelling some 75,000 miles by horse, mule, camel, ox-wagon, junk, dhow, raft and on foot."
With Battutah's 'Travels' ever in hand, the author re-discovers shrines, mosques and churches and finds similarities - and vast differences - in the lifestyle of the people he meets on the way.
This, the first volume, covers Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey and the Crimea.
Mr Mackintosh-Smith writes wonderful descriptions, both witty and intelligent; he peppers his work with tales taken from Battutah and elsewhere; he draws us in to his one-man archaeological efforts as he seeks to identify places mentioned in the work. And the reader experiences a thrill as he conclusively identifies somewhere, where Battutah himself would have stood so long ago.
This is a wonderful read and I hope to go on and read the other two volumes. ( )

As others have observed, Tim Mackintosh-Smith does a very good impersonation of the charming, old-fashioned type of eccentric British scholar, both on screen and on the printed page. Quite a scary thought when I realise that he and I must have been contemporaries at university, though I don't think we ever met. I'm not that old, am I?

Travels with a tangerine simply oozes with charm — the nicest possible sort of ooze, Dundee marmalade, perhaps — a very English mix of erudition, self-deprecation, silly schoolboy puns, and that strange obsession with defecation that goes with a certain type of English middle-classness. He's quite aware of this, and frequently mocks himself for doing it. Interestingly, he cites Patrick Leigh Fermor as one of the travel writers he most admires.

It's a pure pleasure to follow him on his quasi-random wanderings around Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey and the Crimea. Don't be surprised if it leaves you with an inexplicable urge to read medieval Arabic travel books, though.

I read Ibn Battutah's Travels (in Mackintosh-Smith's abridgement of the Gibb translation) just before Travels with a Tangerine (I had seen the TV documentaries a few years earlier): if possible, I think it is best to start out by forming your own impression of Ibn Battutah before you get Mackintosh-Smith's image of him lodged into your mind. Ibn Battutah (with the occasional help of M-S's discrete footnotes) is great fun and perfectly accessible to the ordinary reader, although few of us would have found our way to him without a bit of a nudge from Mackintosh-Smith. I have at least half a dozen books on my shelves where Ibn Battutah features in the index, but until I saw Mackintosh-Smith talking him up on the telly it never occurred to me to go and read him myself. That's Mackintosh-Smith's mission in operation: he's quoted in an interview (by Justin Marozzi) as saying "I shall not rest until people are saying 'Who's Marco Polo?' and they're saying, 'He's the Venetian Ibn Battutah'!" Of course, there is a bit more to it too: Mackintosh-Smith also wants to give his Western readers a gentle reminder that Arabs and Muslims are just ordinary people like the rest of us, and that there's more to the Middle East than what we see on television news.

Mackintosh-Smith calls his technique "inverse archaeology", by which he seems to mean the search for traces of the present in the texts of Ibn Battutah and his contemporaries. He's always especially keen to find human traces: people, or stories, with a direct connection back to something Ibn Battutah mentions. Surprisingly often, he succeeds, and we can really feel his thrill when someone is able to cap a story Ibn Battutah tells or identify a person mentioned in the text as an ancestor. But he also loves looking for the buildings, tombs, and even camp-sites that Ibn Battutah describes, all of which he describes in a fresh, interesting way. I'm looking forward to the second instalment (and the third, when it comes...). ( )

To my mind, M-S looks rather like a secretary bird. In case you've forgotten what a secretary bird looks like, Google: " secretary bird image" and for comparison "M-S...". Unfortunately, I have not found an image of M-S showing his legs, which makes it difficult for you to form a judgement.
M-S is one of those English eccentrics whom we cherish partly because they are so seldom encountered and may be becoming even rarer, indeed extinct in many parts of the British Isles and former colonies.
Travels is subtitled: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah. Ibn Battutah (IB) henceforth, was a native of Morrocco who set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca in the early thirteen hundreds, and kept on travelling - as far North as the Volga river, as far South as Tanzania and Mali in Africa, and then West through India and on to China. IB was a lucky man. He had an eye for the ladies and got married in most of his longer stopping points. He had his mishaps too. Having charmed an Indian potentate he was given a grand present to convey to the emperor of China. He lost it together with all his own possessions in a storm while his boat was still moored at the quayside. He spent some time in the Maldives and pronounced them paradise.
Travels is not Tim's first book, but it is the first book to catch the public's attention. A three-part documentary-type programme was flighted on BBC4 in 2006, in which M-S was filmed following parts of IB's journey. It was while watching this that the long-legged questing bird comparison occurred to me.
IB eventually returned to Tangiers where he dictated his memoirs at length and at leisure in several volumes. These books became famous across the Arab World. Now his name is becoming more familiar in the West. ( )