In 1333 a traveller from Tangier reached Delhi, and he kept going: to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and beyond. This is what it was like to travel with Ibn Battuta, told slowly for sleep.

Ibn Battuta for sleep: a calm, sourced bedtime history of his years in India and on the Indian Ocean, around 1330 to 1347.

We sail with the monsoon down the coast of East Africa, from Zeila and Mogadishu to the wooden town and coral ruins of Kilwa. We cross the Indus under the new moon, wait at Multan for the sultan's permission, and arrive in the Delhi of Muhammad bin Tughluq, where he served as a qazi beneath the Qutb Minar. We follow the sultan's embassy down to Calicut, where thirteen Chinese junks lay at anchor with their sails left flying, and stay for the storm that changed his plans. Then the Maldives and their cowrie money, Adam's Peak in Ceylon, the rice fields of Bengal, and the port of Samudra in Sumatra.

Gentle narration, disputed dates flagged, no verdicts. Just ships, winds and the pages of an old book.

Main source: Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, Arabic text and French translation by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti (1853–58, public domain). Quotations are our own English translations. Full source list on the Slow Caravan YouTube channel.

The script was researched and written from the sources listed.

Slow Caravan tells the journeys of the Indian Ocean world.