I really am road junkie like Marco Polo or James Cook or Ibn Battuta. Last year Goran told me about “Tales of Endurance” written by Fergus Fleming, and I read just three stories before I stopped. I don’t know why I stopped reading this book, but I remember quite well the story about 14th Century Moroccan scholar and explorer Ibn Battuta. I was very surprised to find out that Ibn Battuta visited China just sixty years after Marco Polo, and that he in fact travelled much more than Marco Polo, namely 75 000 miles, 40 countries and three continents in a 30-year odyssey. Yet he was never mentioned in my geography books. Yesterday we found a documentary travelogues in which Tim Mackintosh-Smith follows in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah:

Episode 1 - Wanderlust
Beginning in north Africa, Tim visits Battutah’s birthplace of Tangier in Morocco, and stumbles on a performance of medieval trance music. In Egypt, he goes to a remote village where Battutah had an astonishing prophetic dream and visits the world’s oldest university in Cairo.

Episode 2 - Magicians and Mystics
In Turkey, Tim watches an illegal whirling dervish ceremony, and in the Taurus mountains he meets the last of the Turkoman nomads. He chats to Tatars in Crimea, while in Delhi he watches a Muslim magician performing the Indian rope trick.

 Episode 3 - Trade Winds
Tim explores the place of Islam in Hindu-dominated India and communist China, and tells the story of the Islamic trade empire of the 14th century. In China, he meets a clan who trace their ancestry back to Arabs, and witnesses an illegal Arabic lesson.