Morocco
The best way to describe Morocco is as a constant sensory overload. The sights, the smells, the sounds, the tastes, the feel of the Saharan heat, it is like nowhere I have ever been - particularly in Marrakesh. Morocco is one of the most colorful countries I have every been in as every store, restaurant, and camel is decorated with vibrant colors that you rarely see in the Western world making your eyes do this constant dance to try to take it all in.
Although Marrakesh is not known as a particularly rich city, it is home to some of the most beautiful marble work I have ever seen, nothing on a scale as grand as the basilicas of Rome or mosques of Istanbul, but the intricate detail and the colors used are something else. One place where this sticks out in particular is at La Mamounia which is consistently rated as the one of the world’s top hotels and Africa’s best hotel.
Everyone seems to be cooking something at all times and it all (mostly) smells amazing. The smell coming from some guy with three teeth cooking who-knows-what on a roadside grill will always call my name. On the rare occasions when you don’t smell someone cooking, your nose still doesn’t get a break as it will inevitably pick up the scent of donkey or camel shit which seems to be everywhere in the medina of Marrakesh. There is constantly music being played within the city as well. Whether it is coming from the snake charmers playing a song for their king cobra (“Excuse me sir, why is your cobra not in a cage?”), random guys walking around with drums, the bells on all the animals, or the call to prayer five times a day from the mosques, some sort of rhythm is always going on.
On top of all of this, people are constantly yelling at you trying to sell you something - literally anything that you look at. I even had one guy try to sell me his shoes after he saw me glance at them. Of course, this is Africa so you have to barter for anything and everything you want to buy as they will constantly try to rip off any tourist they can.
This brings me to the most important lesson Morocco taught me and perhaps the most important lesson I have ever learned during my travels. I want to be “uncomfortable” when I travel. This surprises many people but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Being uncomfortable in a situation means you are experiencing something totally new and learning something that you cannot learn from a book or television. It means you are experiencing a new culture for what it is and not the sugar-coated version given to many tourists. Don’t get me wrong, when I vacation, I still want my 5-star hotel with some guy bringing me beers all day. However, there is a huge difference between vacation and travel as I understand it. While in Morocco, I was uncomfortable for 7 days straight and in a way breathed a sigh of relief when I returned to Spain after. A huge contributing factor to this uncomfortability was the fact that I was lost for 7 days straight. Navigating the streets and alleys of the medina in Marrakesh is a skill that I am convinced only a local born into it has. There are no street signs, dead-ends everywhere, and there is not a single straight street as far as I could see, so you almost instantly lost your sense of direction. On top of this, all of the streets are dirt and every building is this reddish sand color making everything look identical. Even Google maps was useless in that chaos.
Now comes the fun part. The few who are not selling something are actually the biggest scammers of them all. For those few, they will just try to talk to you and make “friends” with you. As soon as you look down at your phone to try to look at a map, or even if you stop walking for a few seconds to think, there will inevitably be some guy who will come up to you within seconds and strike up a conversation. This could be anything from asking where you are from, what you think of Marrakesh, or where you are going, but at some point he will undoubtedly ask where you are going and if you want directions. This happened during my first hours in the city and I learned my lesson the hard way. I let him give me directions and instead of just giving them to me, he said he’d walk me there. After some friendly conversation, we took a stop at his family’s tannery where he wanted to show me how leather is made (worst smell I’ve ever smelt).
After I got the tour, the owner grabbed my arm and told me to pay him. It really caught me off guard and I wasn’t sure what to do so I gave him some money. We left and when my ‘guide’ and I arrived at my destination, he also grabbed my arm and told me to pay him. I was completely out of cash at this point, so he actually walked me to an ATM and stood behind me with a bunch of his friends to make sure I took out money. I had some issues with the ATM and it wouldn’t let me take anything out so I pleaded with him that I tried and failed. He finally let me go to my museum but stood outside waiting for me to try again later. I eventually had to hide out in the museum until he left. I later learned that this commonly happens to people new to Morocco and thus it is best to not ask for directions. Situations like this are undoubtedly unsettling but they also make you learn a lot in a very short amount of time making them invaluable experiences.
On to my next favorite kind of lesson… food. I couldn’t leave Marrakesh without doing the same food tour Anthony Bourdain once did there, so on my last night there I readied my stomach for anything and everything. Goat head, served whole with tongue, eyes, and brains included? Yes, please. Lizards on a stick and snail soup? A little more than I bargained for but what the hell.
What the food guide did not tell me is that the next day I would be completely sick with food poisoning on my trip into the 112 degree Sahara desert. I spent a day in a village of 800 people on the edge of the Sahara where their only cure for me was boiling hot mint tea and no air conditioning - one of my more memorable moments in life. Although I did not get a chance to see the iconic giant sand dunes of the Sahara, the part that I did see still had the desolate beauty written about by poets and story tellers for centuries.
I even made a friend in the desert!
Tangier, a port city on the Strait of Gibraltar in the north of the country, is a city that seems to be more modern than Marrakesh due to its proximity to Spain, yet it seems like a much rougher city. Tangier is known as a hub for drug smugglers all over the world and as such has earned a reputation as being a sort of outlaw city. The narrow winding alleys they call streets are filled with people trying to sell you all sorts of drugs, but in particular the local specialty - hash. Among these dirty streets filled with drug dealers and run down buildings, one would think there would not be very good food options, yet one would be very, very wrong to think that. I had one of the best meals of my life in a hole in the wall restaurant down one of these alleys. It was one of those places where you know its going to be good since they have no menu, you just sit down and they serve you whatever is good today. Baby shark skewers, camel cheek, whole grilled snapper, fresh figs, a homemade wine? Yes, yes, and more yes.
The first trip to Morocco definitely has to be a learning experience for most people as it was for me. There is way more to Morocco than we see in guide books and I barely scratched the surface. I’ll be back at some point delighting in its charming chaotic beauty.
P.S. for my readers who know me personally, if you want a good laugh at my expense, ask me about my experience at a Moroccan hammam.
