OVERVIEW
Carolyn McIntyre will travel from the Moroccan City of Tangiers through 46 countries as she attempts to recreate an epic journey made 700 years ago by the famed Islamic scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta.
Along the way she will visit:
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Oman, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Italy, Spain, Mali, Mauritania, Niger.
Carolyn McIntyre
Arabist, Middle East political analyst and award-winning expedition creator to Asia, Carolyn McIntyre has over three decades of living, working and traveling in the Middle East. A native of Scotland, she headed the Middle Eastern and South-East Asian program for San Francisco-based Geographic Expeditions for eight years, but in 2006 exchanged her desk for the open road as a tour leader and professional nomad as she fulfills a long-held dream of retracing the epic journey of the great 14th century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta. A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, she has traveled extensively worldwide, and her interests besides pouring over old maps and reading travel journals, are Islamic architecture and medieval Islam. When not on the trail of Ibn Battuta or leading trips for GeoEx, Carolyn lives in Sana'a in Yemen in a tower house in the Old City.
Ibn Battuta
Born in Tangier, Morocco in 1304, Ibn Battuta began his 29-year epic journey in 1325. He originally set out to perform the Haj in Mecca, but when he arrived at the Red Sea he found all boats had been sunk as the result of a local insurrection and he was unable to travel further. Unwilling to return home without completing the Haj, he traveled back to Cairo and then crossed the northern Sinai to join the Haj caravan in Damascus the following year. This completed, innate curiosity and insatiable wanderlust took over (he had by now confessed to wishing "to travel through the earth"), and instead of returning home, he traveled 75,000 miles throughout the Islamic World. In today's world this covers 44 countries. His desire to traverse its entirety never wavered and despite occasional and sometimes severe adversity, he succeeded. On his eventual return to Morocco in 1354, where he became a jurist, he dictated his rihla, or travels, to a scribe. His writings languished until 1839, when the French found a manuscript in Algeria. Hailed as the 'Marco Polo of the East', his record of life in 14th century Turkey, East Africa and the Malabar Coast of India remain the most extensive on record.
