How long can the body go without drinking water or eating? How does one kill thirst when water is unavailable or unsafe? Which drugs can best quell seasickness? This paper will look at medical texts about preparing to travel, and especially by sea, in the premodern Indian Ocean World. Many texts reflected a world in which travel was simultaneously common and dangerous, because it exposed bodies to “airs, waters and places” far different from what they were accustomed to. For example, a manuscript from the personal collection of al-Malik al-Af?al al-‘Abb?s, a Ras?lid sultan who reigned from 1363-1377, includes a short treatise on medicine addressed to the prospective traveller (man ‘azama ‘al? ‘l-safar). The manuscript includes several other medical texts -- some composed by the sultan himself. I will compare these with relevant chapters from Persian texts composed in Ahmedabad by Shih?b al-D?n al-Nagawr? at the end of the fourteenth century. These sources were composed at two major crossroads in the region: Ras?lid Yemen and Mu?affarid Gujarat. For many, the idea of sea travel conjures narratives from the Atlantic World: “high sea exploration” in the age of European colonialism. This attests to the longevity of colonial discourses both within academia and in popular cultural, though scholarship by Houari Touati has expanded the meanings of Islamic travel. Less understood is the physical experience of travel by land and sea between the emporia dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Fewer still are those accounts connecting texts composed in South Asia and the Middle East. Drawing on medical texts, this paper will bring us closer to the materiality of travel and the bodily experiences of travelers. I will place the medical discourses about travel within the multifaceted cultural understandings of sea travel in late medieval Islamicate contexts. First, I will give an overview of major themes in earlier medical texts on “regimen for travel,” followed by an explanation of how both Arabic and Persian medical texts composed in South Asia have been consistently neglected. Then, I will move to a discussion of a few of the recipes suggested for allaying seasickness and quenching thirst in these texts, using them to trace commonalities and variation in medical practices across the region. Finally, I will ask what these recipes can tell us about sea travel, especially when supplemented by documentary evidence about materia medica from the Cairo Geniza.