I'd like to talk about Ibn Battuta, the traveller from Tangier, which is my home city in Morocco. There's a big shopping centre and even an airport named after him, so you can't grow up here without hearing his name.
He lived in the fourteenth century. He left Tangier when he was only about twenty-one, intending to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which would've been a long trip in itself. But instead of coming home, he kept going for nearly thirty years. He travelled across North Africa and the Middle East, down the coast of East Africa, through Central Asia to India, where he worked as a judge in Delhi, and then on to the Maldives and China.
He's famous mainly because of the book that came out of those journeys. When he finally returned, the sultan asked a scholar to write down his stories, and that account is still one of the most detailed descriptions we have of the medieval world, from what people ate to how markets and courts worked.
I admire him for a few reasons. The first is pure courage. He travelled at a time when a journey meant shipwrecks, bandits and disease, and he faced all three. The second is his curiosity about other people. He didn't just pass through places; he married, worked and made friends in them. And I suppose the third reason is personal. I'm studying tourism, and he reminds me that travel isn't about collecting photographs. It's about actually trying to understand how other people live, which is something I hope to pass on to the visitors I'll guide one day.