Ibn Battutah, whose name can be translated as Son of a Duck, is my hero and is regarded as “the traveller of Islam”. He left his native city of Tangier in 1325 at the age of 21, with the intention of performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he continued beyond Mecca. Travelling by horse, mule, ox wagon, junk, dhow and on foot, he covered over 75,000 miles and visited over 40 countries. Wherever he went, he found it easy to get employment as a jurist or a courtier or an ambassador. His journeys involve swashbuckling adventures and chases with concubines in tow. He is a riveting read.

The interesting thing with Ibn Battutah is that travel for him was not just going from one place to another – it was living in a place. Wherever he went he made his home. He had a house, he married and he got a job. This allowed him to learn about the place by living as a part of it. Then he would move on. It wasn’t until he returned to Morocco in his ripe old age that he wrote down all his adventures. It’s got a wonderful title in full: The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travels.

What does he find on his travels?

You have to read it to discover that. But what is important is that everywhere he went, although he could not perfectly merge with the cultures he encountered, he took a great amount of time trying to understand them. He treated each culture on its own terms, and didn’t impose his own values on them. I think that’s very important for any traveller – if you want to learn from a different culture then you have to treat it with equality and respect. Only then will that culture become available to you. If you go there with too many of your own preconceptions, then you will limit your experience.

What does travel mean for you?

Travel is both a physical and a mental exercise – it is about immersing yourself in another culture. Travel is the process of letting go of yourself and immersing yourself in different ways of knowing and seeing. If you cannot do this, you haven’t travelled. It’s certainly not a holiday. Travelling is not staying in five-star hotels.

Is it acceptable to challenge people’s beliefs when you are travelling, or should you always just respect different cultures?

Dialogue is obviously very important, but it has to be from a basis of knowledge, not from a basis of ignorance. And the only way you are going to develop knowledge about another culture is if you live in that culture for a considerable period of time. You simply can’t walk into a completely different city, with a different culture, and begin a reasonable dialogue. You can only learn so much from books – in order to really learn about a culture you have to live and see the world through its eyes.

*

Michael Jacobs recommends:

Modern travel books on South America are so scarce and cliché-ridden that it is wonderful to find one so fresh, funny and perceptive as Christopher Isherwood’s beautifully written The Condor and the Cows. Isherwood, curiously enough, had no desire to write this book – he was commissioned by his American publishers – and developed a general distaste for the continent, and for the Andes in particular, which he found claustrophobic and gloomy.

The book is appropriately sarcastic, curmudgeonly and iconoclastic, in a way that prefigures Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. Yet whereas Theroux has little of interest to say about the Andes – his whole attitude towards them was determined by altitude sickness – Isherwood shows continual curiosity about the politics, culture and history of the countries he goes through. In Ecuador, for instance, he goes out of his way to meet the leading Ecuadorean painter Guaysamin, and finds him a charismatic person who had begun to inspire an indigenous cultural revival. Many of Isherwood’s political judgments are very pertinent today, and he got the Incas absolutely right.

How so?

He recognised the greatness of Inca civilisation without in any way idealising it, as do so many other writers. The Incas were as bloodthirsty as the Spaniards, and no less brutally imperialistic. As with the similarly romanticised Muslim civilisation in Spain, their downfall was greatly assisted by internal dissent.

I think that Isherwood would have been in agreement with many of the views of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who attributes to the Incas the gloomier side to his nation’s character, and who is critical of such present-day political correctness as replacing a statue of [the Spanish conquistador] Pizarro in Lima’s main square with an entirely bogus Inca flag. The Incas, of course, never had a flag. Isherwood himself memorably characterised the Incas as: “Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.”

*

Sara Wheeler recommends:

This is ostensibly the story of Captain Scott’s 1912 expedition to the Antarctic, but it’s really about all places at all times and is possibly the best book ever written. Cherry – as he was known – was on the expedition, and the book has been in print since 1922. For him, Scott didn’t really fail, and I suppose he had to think that. When he came back, three of his friends had died, the war had happened while he was away, the world had changed for the worse, and his big act of redemption was writing this book.

It started out as the official story of the expedition but became the unofficial story as he elevated it to the universal. The actual “worst journey in the world” was a side journey to collect the eggs of the emperor penguins. He writes about the absence of people and the spiritual dimension of that, describing the endeavour as not just his but as all endeavours – whether it is building a shed or fence, going on any journey, or putting down your last glass.

None of the current books you read about journeys are about the journey being worth it in itself. But this is a masterpiece, and was definitely part of what inspired me to go to Antarctica myself. It is a deeply inspiring book in which he tries to redeem something from the journey. The last line is: “If you march your winter journeys you’ll have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.”

What is the effect on the human spirit of being in the Antarctic? I would have thought being so alone would make you depressed.

No, it doesn’t. It takes you outside your normal existence and sets you loose from your spiritual moorings. Everywhere in the Antarctic is like that, and in the Arctic you feel it when you get away from the settlements. The polar regions are very uplifting – a different place, a better place. They are very compelling. People keep going back once they’ve been.

I spent seven months in Antarctica and I can’t keep going back there because it’s so hard to get to, but I do go back to the Arctic. Antarctica is easily definable – a continent – and it is not owned, which is very important. The Arctic is owned and fucked up, and the people have been fucked over by successive regimes.