Welcome to Beyond the Keep, your one-stop travel consulting service headed by none-other than the world famous traveler, Ibn Battutah! We are so glad that you’ve chosen to use our services for your travel, and in order to help you plan your next trip, we would like to extend some information about Beyond the Keep that we believe will be vital to your understanding of what we do.

About

Beyond the Keep is every medieval travelers best friend when time comes let down the drawbridge, cross the moat, and leave the bastide. Ibn Battutah, the greatest traveler of our time, founded our service. After thirty years of travel, spanning all the way from Eastern Africa to the far reaches of China and then all the way down to the Eastern Coast of Africa, Battutah returned from his journey and decided that he wanted to share his experiences with the world. So in addition to writing about his travels, he also founded this company in order to help others achieve the dream that Battutah once shared–to see the world. Beyond the Keep, drawing from our founder Ibn Battutah's travel history, emphasizes going "off the beaten path" and into unknown lands in the pursuit of cultural education, global knowledge and universal, otherworldly experiences.

Sections marked by the following symbol indicate Ibn Battutah's direct input: ⌘

Using Battutah’s real-life experiences to help inform our suggestions is definitely one of our biggest strengths and really sets us apart from other travel services out there. The merchants of a country set the terms of trade, travel and interaction around the Indian Ocean Trade Route destinations, less so by their leaders. Therefore it is important to always have an up-to-date, insider handle on what is going on in these destinations and what the best approaches to traveling in these areas are. That's where we come in.

By working with our founder to analyze his encounters and experiences, we’ve created a variety of Destination Guides that will tell you everything you need to know about these famed trade cities so that you too can travel with the wisdom, experience and eagerness of Ibn Battutah. These guides include sections about the Lay of the Land, things that you and your companions can See & Do, Weekend Trips that we recommend and even a few notes and facts about cultural customs, travel advisories, and much, much more. By preparing you for your travels with this information, we aim to both enlighten you with worldly knowledge about the Indian Ocean trade route, but also best equip you for your journey ahead–we hope to make it as amazing and enjoyable an experience as possible.

Of course we do not claim to know everything, because that is impossible–that is one of the biggest challenges of being in this industry. However, we do not see this as a deterrent. Even with the best travelers at our disposal, with life-long experience with trips around the globe, we will never know everything about one destination. Our world is constantly changing, and that’s what makes it so exciting. There will always be a degree of uncertainty, and there will always be the unknown… but isn’t that the beauty of travel anyways?