Intrepid travelers, intrepid research

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, 2016

A true classic. In 1325, Ibn Battutah, a Muslim cleric and legal scholar, set out from Tangier for the haj to Mecca. He ended up traveling for most of his life. He traversed the Mediterranean, Middle East and Persia, spent 12 years in the Indian sub-continent, traveled to Southeast Asia and China before returning to North Africa. In 1351, he was back on the road, across the Sahara to Mali. Finally, he sat down in Fez with another Muslim scholar to record 30 years of travel experiences. Battutah, who has been compared to the most famous medieval Christian traveler, Marco Polo, was an eagle-eyed observer, making notes on landscape, people, religion, politics, trade, and many other topics. He was able to do so because, like all travelers of his age, he moved slowly. Most of the 75,000 miles he logged was by camel. Renting camels isn’t as easy as it once was, so it’s impossible to match the pace of Battutah’s travels. That’s a pity because as travelers we could learn much from Battuta’s patient observations.

Elizabeth Pisani, 2014

Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist, travelled across the vast Indonesian archipelago, clocking more than 21,000 miles by boat, bus and motorbike, and as many by plane. More than half a century since gaining independence from the Dutch, the world’s fourth most populous country, with more than 300 ethnic groups, is still struggling to establish its identity amid regional conflicts, the depletion of natural resources and a growing wealth gap. With insight and wit, Pisani takes the reader on an enthralling, sometimes maddening journey from crowded cities to remote islands, where she bumps into people from many walks of life—from politicians to peasant farmers—as she tries to make sense of an “improbable nation.”

Candice Millard, 2006

Millard’s account of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1913-14 expedition almost 1,000 miles down a treacherous, unmapped river in the Amazon is riveting, a twisting, suspenseful plot with larger-than-life characters. The rain forest literally comes alive, sometimes loud and threatening, sometimes dark and foreboding, physically and psychologically impenetrable. Time and again, the expedition encounters churning rapids, and has to decide whether to run them, risking lives or the loss of dugouts and supplies, or hack its way through the forest on a portage that can take several days. To research the book, Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic, embarked on a long and challenging expedition of her own across disciplines including anthropology, botany, ornithology and tropical medicine, and through archives and collections in the United States and Brazil, to painstakingly piece together the written accounts of the expedition’s members.