“When we go to Morocco, I think we should have completely different names and be completely different people.” – Penny Lane
Perspective is a tricky thing. When you’re somewhere, immersed in the experience, it’s tough to be detached enough to let it all sink in.
I think that especially in the case of this trip, getting home was such a hassle that it unfairly prevented me from focusing on how amazing the trip was and how many fun, interesting and truly incredible things I saw and did in a short amount of time.
So what’s changed?
I like to think that every trip I take changes me a little bit. After all, what are we if not the sum of our experiences? When I first arrived home, it was hard to think of it in those terms, but now, I think I can safely say that this trip to Morocco led to certain changes:
- My bank account. Unfortunately, for the negative. After a couple of months of chasing down airlines and insurance companies, I managed to get my money back for approximately half of what it cost me to get home during the volcano debacle. The other half will, sadly, not be seen again. Thanks to my wonderful family, who helped bail me out, this hasn’t been as painful as it could have been. But it’s still taken a toll on my travel fund and on my budget.
- My attitude towards tours. I hadn’t taken a tour in quite a while before the Morocco one. And it wasn’t bad or anything. In fact, it was actually pretty good; I met some great people, saw lots of things I probably wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. But sometime over the past decade, I think I just got too stubborn or independent-minded to play follow-the-leader. The incredibly fast pace, the irrelevant shopping, the compromises necessary to travel with a large group… I think this was the tour that broke the camel’s back, no pun intended. I can’t say I’ll never take a tour again in my life, and I am certainly not against booking day tours or local tours at a destination. But I think I’m done with the group travel thing, for the next while anyway.
- My backpacker status. It’s kind of like getting older. You don’t notice it happening, and yet, it’s unavoidable. Sometime over the past decade, I’ve swapped out my shorts, sarongs and ratty t-shirts for smarter jackets, shirts and a hairdryer. Hell, I even took both my netbook and my ipod on this trip – and I was glad to have them. That’s right, it seems that – despite my best efforts not to – I have become a flashpacker. I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end and that I’m not going to turn into one of those people who uses designer luggage and only stays in hotels with valet service. If that ever happens, shoot me first. But I guess I need to just accept the inevitable and embrace my new status.
- My perception of market economies. You think you get the idea of capitalism in its most literal sense, but it doesn’t quite sink in until you experience a Moroccan souk. Everything I thought I knew from the markets in places like Israel, multiplied by a thousand. It’s a full-on, any-scam-goes, buyer-beware free for all. Working in marketing, behind a desk most of the time, it’s incredible how different things seem when you put them in the perspective of the Moroccan medina analogy.
- My taste for tagine. Four months on, and I still can’t eat Moroccan food. I went from loving it to eating it twice a day for two weeks straight, and I think I OD’d. It wouldn’t be the first time; after two weeks in Costa Rica, it took me about six months before I could even look at rice and beans again. So I fully expect my taste for tagine to return soon.
Trip highlights?
I hate answering this question, because highlights are so subjective, and are really just a series of moments. But here were just a few:
- Deux jours à Paris on the way to Morocco. It was supposed to be just a stopover, but it rekindled my love affair with the city.
- That first sip of sweet mint tea, in the Rabat casbah overlooking the ocean.
- Best. Dinner. Ever. At a wonderful riad in Fes. Thinking about it still makes my mouth water.
- Surprise lunch with Aziz’s family in Todra Gorge.
- Ait Benhaddou, dancing for what felt like hours with the guesthouse owner and his over-excited kids.
- Essaouira, wandering around the old city and soaking in the chilled out atmosphere.
- Watching the Habs beat the Caps in the playoffs on WiFi in the Essa hotel lobby at two am, with over-excited Morrocans who wanted to learn about the game.
- Volcanic ash-enhanced as they might have been, the spectacular sunsets in Marrakech will always make me remember the city as beautiful.
- Dinner in Madrid during my impromptu stopover with three other stranded tour members, at that wonderful fish restaurant where the owner kept bringing us free drinks.
Trip lowlights?
That’s the thing about travel – you get shaken out of the comfortable, even complacency of daily life into a zone of extremes – heightened highs, lowered lows. Some of the lowlights of Morocco were:
- The constant, constant hassling and haggling for everything. At first, it was amusing and sort of a personal challenge. At the end of two weeks, it was just plain exhausting. I couldn’t imagine it long-term.
- Communication mixup in Meknes, which led to members of my tour frantically looking for me while I was just minding my own business and exploring. I felt pretty bad about it afterwards, but I also got a bit resentful of constantly being babysat.
- Seeing the extreme poverty in a lot of the cities and rural areas, and not being able to do much of anything about it. It’s not the first time I’ve encountered that in my travels, and it won’t be the last. In many ways, it’s an amazing experience. But it’s also disconcerting when it’s so up close and personal like that.
- The Sahara desert hit me pretty hard. It wasn’t a lowlight, technically, since it was awesome and awe-inspiring. But there’s something about the vast nothingness that just affected me emotionally as well as mentally. It was tough to process, and threw me off for a couple of days afterwards.
- Catching a cold in Imlil and spending the last few days of the trip sick. Not catastrophic or anything, but also not much fun.
- Thinking I was going to be stranded due to the volcano, with no way to get home. Though in retrospect, aside from the financial impact, it really didn’t end up being that big of a deal. Still, that feeling of helplessness when I had no idea how everything was going to play out was a definite low.
Overall impressions?
Morocco was not an easy place for me to visit.
Oh, it’s not that it was particularly challenging, either, not in the way you might think. If you speak a bit of the local language, and are willing to negotiate a bit, it’s actually pretty easy to get around. I found the people friendly, welcoming and warm, the tourist infrastructure fairly good, and the sights interesting. Being on a tour meant I could be even lazier than usual in terms of the practicalities. So it’s not like it was hard to travel there.
No, the challenge was all on my side. It came from reconciling the lavish opulence of the royal palaces with the extreme poverty in the desert villages. From having to constantly remind myself that not everyone is out to scam me, and that while a healthy dose of skepticism is smart, constantly distrusting everyone is doing myself a disservice as well as everyone around me. From feeling vaguely uncomfortable as a Jewish woman in a Muslim country, even though everyone was incredibly friendly and I never heard so much as a remark on that front. From wanting to understand things that I could sense all around me, but that were just outside of my grasp.
Sure, it would have been easy to tune most of that out. I did, a lot of the time. Sat in the van, saw the sights, snapped some photos, ate some good food, shopped for a few souvenirs. But it left me frustrated. I knew I was just getting the surface view of an incredibly complex society that’s in transition, and that has geopolitical significance beyond the size of its borders. There’s just no way to get a better understanding on such a short trip, and it drove me nuts.
Would I go back? Maybe, for a different sort of trip. But probably not as a tourist. For me, Morocco was more the kind of place that I found fascinating than the kind of place where I could see myself living or staying long-term. Some people may interpret that as a criticism. It’s not. In fact, I think that the most worthwhile form of travel is the kind that shakes you out of your comfort zone. I loved that about Morocco; it’s what it says about me that I’m not so sure I like.