Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Tim Mackintosh-Smith concludes his travels in the footsteps of Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah across the ‘worlds beyond the winds’.

Seven centuries on, his pursuit of this 14th Century traveller takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra(via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls ‘IB’ – a man who out-travelled Marco Polo by a factor of three, who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines.