I just read something which I found pretty moving, it’s from Ibn Battuta’s memoirs. He was a Moroccan who lived in the 14 th century and was one of the great travelers of history. He went to China, India, Central Asia, West and East Africa, Byzantium, Indonesia and many other places. In the chapter which I was reading, he tells how he arrived in the Maldives and, being a learned man – he had been a qadi, an Islamic judge, in the court of the Sultan of Delhi – he was more or less forced by the local ruler to become a qadi, as they were short of competent people. However, Ibn Battuta then quickly married three or four women from powerful local families – he seems to have been a healthy lad, who even while dictating his memoirs in his old age still remembered pretty well the beautiful noses and eyes of Mahrati women and the stout bodies of Berber women – and thus became so well-connected that the ruler became afraid of him. A quarrel ensued and Ibn Battuta was forced to leave the archipelago in great haste. During his escape, he writes these lines:

“ We continued to travel through the islands from one district to another and came to a tiny island in which there was but one house, occupied by a weaver. He had a wife and family, a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and to cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. His island contained also a few banana trees, but we saw no land birds on it except two ravens, which came out to us on our arrival and circled above our vessel. And I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I could have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.”

I guess that all great travelers sometimes arrive on some lovely, remote spot on earth, in which they feel like spending the rest of their days. In his case, what he saw seems to have been a super –duper dream spot, imagine that: that weaver man and his family, in their house plop in the middle of a little tropical island. Next to the house is a banana tree grove, then around it you have the golden sanded beach, fringed with coconut trees, and there’s the little boat bobbing on the translucent waves of the crystal clear lagoon. Does it get any cuter than that ? When we’re young, we want to see the world’s big cities and famous spots. As we grow old, we start to yearn for spots like this one. It’s like we wish the world would forget us.