Travels with a Tangerine

I read this book in 2011, before I wrote reviews, and enjoyed it a lot. There are three in Mackintosh-Smiths series, and I recently acquired the third, which was reason enough to re-read book one and two.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (TMS) is without doubt an academic, but one who is also interested in getting involved in the experience, and travelling the route himself. In this book, he visits numerous locations, following the route of Ibn Battutah (IB) who set out in 1325 from his native Tangier in Morocco on a thirty year ‘look around' the world. TMS won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award with this boo, when published in 2001.

The thing about this book, is it is perhaps not the easiest of reads. I find it quite self-indulgent - although I qualify this by saying that isn't a bad thing - TMS obviously writes about the things he is passionate about, and so he should - but it hops around from topic to topic somewhat wantonly, and is particularly “Saint” and “tomb” heavy, but such was IB's own interest and writing similarly focussed.

Rather than ramble on too long, I have added some of the more amusing parts I enjoyed:

P199

The typography of IB's route was, not surprisingly, unchanged; but its human geography had altered. Sur had grown, Qalhat - Marco Polo's Calatu, ‘a noble city... frequented by numerous ships with goods from India” - had all but disappeared. And there was a new toponym, al-Anji. I had heard the name in Sur while asking a tug-master for directions, and rifled my memory for a mention of the place. It certainly wasn't in the Travels”, and it seemed to have eluded Ibn al-Mujawir, whose thirteenth-century anecdotal geography is the best guide to the bottom half of Arabia. “You know,” the tug-master said. “The end of the pipeline.” It clicked al-Anji was ‘LNG' - the Liquefied Natural Gas terminal.

It wasn't the age of the Crimean Air plane that was alarming, but the colour scheme. The walls and curtains, in two shades of blue - pleasing enough, rather Oxbridge - were teamed with a fudge coloured carpet and blood-clot seats. Several of these collapsed under my fellow passengers. They were all Turks, all male and all very excitable, and the cabin was filled with whoops and cheers.
Crimean Air, according to my boarding pass, was my reliable partner for journeys to Tashkent, Krasnodar, Minsk, Murmansk, Chelyabinsk - what a poetical boarding pass! - Novosibirsk, Windhoek... Windhoek? As my mind boggled at the idea of Crimeans in the Kalahari, an air hostess appeared through the cockpit door. She was wearing a retina-jangling red trouser-suite, and looked very strict. Chatter ceased, and she began reciting the safety procedure.