Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.