Morocco is tricky, for me, for a number of reasons. Some are simple and trivial — basically everywhere requires cash¹ — but most are complicated. They involve issues of colonialism and imperialism and our sadly intertwined histories. This raises a kind of dilemma for visitors, at least the conscientious ones. You want to keep that history in mind, to connect the things which happened back then to the way things are now. At the same time, you want to look past those preconceptions and try and see the way the world is now.

I’m here because my next stop is Dakar, and lots of the flights to Senegal go through Casablanca, and Morocco seemed like a warm and reasonable place to kill most of my December. It’s been more rainy than I was expecting² but I can’t fault the temperature. It’s never gotten especially hot nor dipped below maybe-I-need-a-jacket in the evenings.³

It’s still something of a point of pride that the first two countries I visited in Africa were Burkina Faso and Nigeria; for a lot of US citizens their experience in Africa begins and ends with a package tour to Egypt or — if you’re adventurous — Kenya.

Of course, Morocco is North Africa, which isn’t the first thing most people in the United States think of when they think of the continent. It even stands out among the North African countries in terms of its liberalism⁴ and has a particularly long history of friendship with the United States, extending from 1777 when it was the first country in the world to recognize the newly formed United States and being largely reaffirmed when US soldiers liberated the country in World War II.

So I really should have visited sooner. The location makes it an obvious option to duck out of Schengen when my visa gets full, especially with the loss of my traditional haunts.⁵ But better late than never, I suppose.

I started by catching the ferry from Tarifa, which drops you right at the port in downtown Tangier. It’s a short ferry ride, less than an hour, and the odd part is that passport control is on the ferry; you’re supposed to take time during your trip to visit the small office before they dock. I didn’t, and had to scurry back onto the ferry and get it done after the fact.

The port in Tangier is right next to the medina,⁶ although the old city is located on the edge of a sheer rock face 50m above sea level, so the first thing you need to do is hike up the equivalent of a 10-story building if you’re staying in the medina.⁷ I had smartly booked a hotel which was right on the edge so it wasn’t difficult to find. I didn’t much like Tangier, although I don’t know how much of that was the city and how much of it was the fact that I had to run errands like finding an ATM and buying a SIM card before adjusting to the rhythms of an entirely new culture.

The medinas have a thoroughly earned reputation for being disorienting to outsiders, and I found that wasn’t the half of it. They’re a welter of streets, some broad with stalls running down either side, some barely wide enough to pass two abreast, and all at odd angles with forks and switchbacks and dead ends. I found it incredibly claustrophobic. Google Maps is at best vaguely helpful.⁸ And they’re typically thronged with people, touts and shopkeepers and tourists and locals all milling around. You’re constantly cajoled into eating at a particular restaurant or browsing the wares in a particular store.⁹

My best advice is to just plunge in and wander. You’ll get lost.¹⁰ But these places are pretty compact. You can typically stroll from one end to the other in under an hour, even with all the twists and turns. And the locals are all happy to provide directions, or even procure a guide to lead you wherever you’re going for a small tip.¹¹ The medinas can be overwhelming, but they’re pretty safe.¹²

That was kind of the first ⅔ of my trip. Hop a ferry or a bus¹³ or a train¹⁴ and visit a new city — Tangier, Chefchaouen, Fes — bunk up in a hotel or riad in or just outside the medina, and mostly relax and work, wandering out for lunch or dinner or sightseeing here and there. All of those cities have their specific charms. Tangier still has a faded bohemian vibe from the Beat Generation. Fes is the cultural center of Morocco and the medina is absolutely filled with handmade goods from furniture to handbags to rugs.¹⁵ And Chefchaouen has a small but unbelievably charming old town, painted a stunning blue. I also spent a couple days in Imlil in a moderately expensive eco-tourist lodge at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in Imlil.¹⁶

And then I arrived in Marrakesh and … I don’t know what it was about the city, but it all just clicked for me. It’s not like it’s fundamentally different than the other places I’ve seen in Morocco. But I felt comfortable there in a way I was never quite in other places. Maybe it’s a thousand small things: the streets in the medina are a little wider,¹⁷ more restaurants take credit cards, there was an bougie cafe just down the alley from the riad indistinguishable from what you might find in Brooklyn.

I stuck close to the medina, but I got to see some of the other neighborhoods, and I wish I had had time to visit Gueliz, the neighborhood at the heart of modern Marrikesh. There’s modern construction everywhere putting up office buildings and shopping malls and nicely landscaped upscale suburbs.¹⁸ So while I adore the historic old town, I’m most fascinated by the way these cities are developing and growing.

I don’t love that it feels a little like what I appreciate about Marrakesh are the modern conveniences; I’d like to think I’m tolerably good at meeting foreign cultures at least halfway¹⁹ but I never claimed to be T. E. Lawrence. I think my favorite places are the ones which manage to blend the old and the new, to respeect the past while keeping an eye firmly on the future. I don’t know if that’s true of Marrakesh, but I’d kind of like to come back and find out.

I ended my trip in Casablanca, famous and sprawling and not much loved by the rest of the country. I can’t speak to its charms — I wasn’t there for more than a day, and didn’t venture out — but after the rest of the places I’ve seen I don’t feel like I was missing out.

I happened to be here during Morocco’s run in the World Cup.²⁰ It was inescapable and infectious; I saw celebratory fireworks in Tangier, street parties in Fes, and watched the Argentina match by satellite on a television in the conference center of the hotel in Imlil.

It was a fitting reminder that as much as we tend to think of North Africa as separate from Europe, it is of course integrated in a myriad of ways, both large and small. I was blessed to have been able to travel through al-Andalus before immediately arriving here; there was a time a millennia ago when Marrakesh, Seville, and Córdoba were all part of the same empire, when the political borders circled the Mediterranean rather than running through the middle of it.

As I sit in the airport in Casablanca, waiting for my flight, it’s good to be reminded that our political borders are, in the end, illusory. They are drawn and redrawn according to the vagaries of history and the whims of kings and bedlamites. Best not to put too much faith in them.

Next: Christmas Day, 2022, Dakar
Prev: Tarifa to Tangier

Footnotes

¹ I have a strong aversion to carrying cash around. It’s harder to deal with, a pain to withdraw or exchange, prone to getting lost or stolen, and — for me, at least — more expensive. The credit cards I use have no foreign transaction fees and give me a better exchange rate than ATMs do.

It was a relief to reach Casablanca, where most of the restaurants seemed vaguely offended that I would even think to ask if they accepted Visa. Of course they would. Who wouldn’t?

² Even the Sahara Desert has a rainy season. I’ve been mostly traveling north of the Atlas Mountains, and that’s basically grasslands and wetlands all the way to the coast, along with the weather you’d expect for that kind of environment.

³ Most of the cities in Morocco are built on hills, I assume for protection, and that means hiking around the medinas involves a lot of elevation changes. So the biggest problem I’ve found is you want to be wearing a light jacket while you’re standing still, but not after you’ve been up and down a bunch of alleys looking for what some rando on the internet swears is the best couscous in Fes.

⁴ Every single place I’ve visited has proudly pointed out their Jewish communities and reiterated the deep ties between the Muslim and Jewish people here.

⁵ Croatia is joining Schengen on January 1^st, and Ukraine is … sigh. Maybe next year. I miss Kyiv intensely.

⁶ Some quick definitions, since I had no idea before arriving. Medina means city, here used to refer to the old city, that confusing assortment of narrow criss-crossing alleyways you’re imagining from spy dramas. A souk is a market, sometimes an open square surrounded by shops but also used to describe particular shopping districts. A riad is a type of housing where a single home built around an open courtyard has been divided into separate apartments — they’re often rented out as hotel rooms as a B&B. And a kasbah is a fortress, although most of them have been converted to private homes or fancy hotels by now.

⁷ Realistically, you probably want to be staying in or near the medina, no matter what city in Morocco you’re visiting. Like most places in the world, there’s the historic center — great for pedestrians — and then generic and/or ugly urban sprawl and the population boomed since the 1950s.

⁸ The map part of Google Maps is largely useless. But it usually knows where whatever you’re looking for is located, and it can usually show you where you’re standing with some degree of accuracy.

There are local and better apps for navigating the medina, but I didn’t try them. Getting lost was, it seemed to me, part of the point.

⁹ Years of living in New York City have perfected my ability to ignore just about anyone trying to get my attention on the street and that served me well in Morocco.

¹⁰ Here’s two tips for finding your way out. First, small streets feed large ones, and large ones lead to the gates. Second, if you keep going uphill or downhill you’ll eventually reach the edge of the old town, and from there it’s easy to find an exit.

¹¹ Some of the nicer hotels and restaurants offer a guide service, where someone will meet you at one of the gates and lead you to their establishment and then safely out again.

¹² The biggest risk seems to be pickpockets and purse snatchers, more of a threat during peak tourist season but, as always, a little situational awareness goes a lot way. Weirdly, they’re more of a risk outside the medina; the cramped spaces and twisty alleys means there’s not a lot of great escape routes.

The situation is different if you’re a woman, of course. Street harassment can be a problem. You’re already constantly having men yelling at you on the street trying to talk you into coming into a shop or a restaurant. It’s not necessarily unsafe, but it’s unpleasant and uncomfortable. The usual advice is to travel with a man.

¹³ You can either catch a normal bus or something called a “grande taxi” — basically a minibus that’s loitering outside the bus or train station. You find one going where you want to go, pay about $5 or $10, and then wait for other passengers. As soon as it fills up, they leave.

I had caught the bus from Tangier, and just as we got within 30 minutes of Chefchaouen it pulled over at the side of the road and loaded everyone who wasn’t continuing on to Fes into a couple grand taxis to complete the trip. And somehow in confusion and the loading and unloading I managed to leave my computer bag in the cab. I explained what happened to the hotel manager, they made a couple phone calls, and I had it back in my hands within 30 minutes. This, despite my not being able to identify the cab and the driver having no idea where I was staying.

¹⁴ Surprisingly great. The cars are a bit worn but well-maintained and the trains arrived and departed promptly from modern stations with good signage. There’s even a high-speed rail line running between Tangier and Casablanca.

¹⁵ As usual, it’s hard to tell how much is local vs. regional vs. shipped in from China. The famous Chouara Tannery means most of the leatherwork is local, I’d think. Beyond that, caveat emptor.

¹⁶ The Kasbah du Toubkal. As the name suggests it’s in a former kasbah that’s been converted, quite comfortably, into hotel suites. The views are stunning, the rooms are cozy if a little rough-hewn, and I wish I had felt a little better while I was there and gotten some hiking in. I think the altitude change got to me.

It’s telling that even in a place like that, in a tiny village in the mountains, the WiFi was solid and I had four bars of cell service the whole time. The biggest problem was the stone walls of my cabin were blocking the signal and I needed to go to the main lodge to reconnect.

The cell coverage across Morocco seems far better than that it is across the UK, at least judging by how often it cut off while I was on the train. I paid $10 for a SIM card with 10 gig of data when I arrived in Tangier.

¹⁷ Although there’s people whizzing through them on mopeds and scooters, so maybe that’s a wash.

¹⁸ The style and weather conspire to make a lot of them feel like they’d fit in perfectly next to Disney Springs. I don’t mean that unkindly; some of them were quite pretty in an architectural sketch kind of way.

¹⁹ To compare, I just had someone ask for my suggestions about places to visit, and after a rousing game of Twenty Questions — do you like cities or nature? keeping active or taking it easy? temperate climates or balmy skies? — it turns out what they really want is a hammock on a beach in a resort. I’m not going to slight people who want to vacation at an all-inclusive resort in Cancún and never make it to see Mérida or Valladolid. But I find it baffling.

²⁰ Weirdly, this year I visited every single country which made it to the quarterfinals, most for more than two weeks, with the singular exception of the Netherlands.