ChrisCrossesCountries

My first full day in Marrakesh I woke up before dawn to the screeching of cats. I’m not sure if they were fighting or fucking and I didn’t really care. I bolted up to the rooftop to get my first minutes of Morocco in the sun. I must’ve stayed up there for an hour snapping photos from the rooftop. After sunrise I went downstairs and began my first full day of exploring Marrakesh. Now I don’t plan on boring you with the ins and out of the day and which castles and markets I visited, there are hundreds if not thousands of blogs, websites, instagram influencers, youtube and tiktok videos that can break down the “Things to do” in Morocco in general. That’s not my goal with this project.

That being said I had mentioned in the previous chapter how out of my depth I was, and I think I knew this deep down before going in. I can remember that even though I was ecstatic to go to Morocco finally and experience this new country I had spent hours of my life on Reddit (Which I don’t recommend anyone do) browsing r/solotravel, r/travel, r/backpacking, and at that time there was a lot of hate and disdain for the country. I felt like every other week I read someone complaining about the scams, the harassment, getting pickpocketed, or just in general having a really bad time. 

Now equipped with this knowledge I was a little more on edge in day two, and I had several plans in motion, the first of which was an app you may have heard of called Tinder. Now for context before I left the United States I had made myself an account and had done the unthinkable and purchased the Super-Duper-Mega-NetflixandChill version of Tinder. Now I had two reasons for spending my money on such a thing. First, with the “Gold” or “Platinum” or whatever version they call it now on Tinder allows you to spoof your location to anywhere in the world. Which is as you can imagine, pretty damn useful for a vagabond such as myself. For those reading who one day wish to travel, you will find that when you are in the motions of traveling you have very little time for checking useless apps like Tinder, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and you’ll open them maybe once a day before you go to sleep or if you have an overly long train ride somewhere and have time to burn, but they are never the forefront of your focus, which is a blessing in disguise in my opinion. But at the same time it makes any sort of keeping in touch, or being aware of what is going on with friends, family or just what’s going on in the world difficult, that doesn’t even include any dating apps where you have to “play the game” back and forth.

The second reason was pretty straightforward, the ability to swipe indefinitely and not be locked out after a minute of swiping is a clear perk and shouldn’t really need any more explanation. I hear some of you saying to yourself, “Chris, if you have no time for swiping and being on useless apps why did you download and buy the premium version of a dating app?” Well because you don’t use Tinder where you are. You use it where you are going to be. When I knew I was going to be leaving the United States and Morocco was on my list I had made a point to try to match with as many locals as I could, and set something up where I could meet them and with some luck have a local take me around the city. 

Make no mistake, this was not an easy task for me. For starters I am infamously a horrible texter and am famous for leaving people on read for weeks at a time because I will read a message, think about how I want to respond and just forget to type it out. If you get a message back from me instantly you should go buy a lottery ticket because you are one of the luckiest people on the planet. Another challenge to overcome is to the best of my understanding there is a very large “Sex Tourism” circuit in Morocco. This was made pretty clear to me based on the profiles I would end up seeing once I changed my location to Marrakesh. I’d guess 80% of the profiles were women trying to sell themselves to for money, and according to some locals I ended up meeting in Morocco, the Moroccan government was at the time doing their best to crackdown on the industry, by making it illegal for Moroccan women to stay in hotels unless they own a passport, which is incredibly difficult for women to obtain in general. Now I am not here to tell you how a country should or shouldn’t handle the rights of its people. Morocco is not my culture and it’s not my country. I’m a visitor, but that never sat right with me on a personal level. Maybe it’s the American in me but restricting an entire gender from doing something as the answer to combat a problem in my eyes is not a solution, it just makes a bigger problem. (It appears as of this writing, at some time in May of 2024 this ban was reversed on the women of Morocco.) 

Before I continue I also want to clarify whether Tinder should be used as a tool for meeting people while traveling. I’ve met other travelers who have used it to great success at finding love or romance in a city they barely knew and that made their trip unforgettable. I’ve also met unfortunate men and women who matched with absolute psychos who stalked them to their hotel room, have been accused of things they didn’t do, had police called on them, and had the absolute worst time imaginable. I cannot tell you whether or not it’s a good idea as so much of it comes down to your own judgment, just like with dating back home. I’m fortunate enough that none of these have happened to me. When I think back to where my head and heart were during the beginning of my trip I had no interest in romance, love, intimacy or anything outside of a friendship that was as shallow as I could make it.

One of my motivators at the time for traveling was that I had become so disenfranchised with my life back home in New Jersey. At that time I was 28 and had hit a point in my life where most of my friends had taken one of two life paths, they were either settling down and buying houses starting families and had no free time, or they wanted to still pretend they were 21 going out to the same three nightclubs on Fridays and Saturdays and drink their weekend away. Neither of those appealed to me and the few friends that I had who hadn’t taken those paths were so busy with work I would see them once or maybe twice every six months. I began to feel a disconnect with almost all of my friends where I couldn’t relate to them, my job working at the hotel had become stale, monotonous, and unrewarding. There was no interest in moving up the corporate ladder in front of me. Add on top of that I had just gotten out of a complex situationship where I caught feelings and ended up on the receiving end of disappointment. I was in no headspace to leave myself vulnerable again, or make an effort to form new and fresh friendships. I had observed the reality of where my life had taken me and I was not satisfied. 

I felt alone and empty with nothing holding me to my hometown, but through that emptiness I also realized that there was nothing stopping me from pursuing my dream of travel. No wife, no kids, no mortgage, no car payment, no pets. So in November of 2022 I realized it was now or never, because this chance to see the world at such a scale would never present itself ever again where I had the time, energy and finances to make this happen. The best advice I can give to you dear reader if you want to travel like I did is to start reading about travel. Specifically a book called “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts. It is the foundation and guide I used for all of my budgeting and decision making. If you only read one book about this style of travel it needs to be this one. There is nothing I can say and tell you about how to travel that Rolf hasn’t already covered and I don’t want to get sued for plagiarism. My goal is to help you with the why to travel, and hopefully give you a laugh or two along the way.

So to get back to the plot of this chapter, I had ended up matching with a local Moroccan woman when I was in London, we will call her Fatema. I had made it clear in my profile that I was a traveler and only going to be in Marrakesh for two days, and was looking for a local to help me explore the city, we had messaged a little bit off and on while I was in London and she had seemed to be quite normal and well adjusted compared to the other women I had matched with so I made a decision to meet her. I spent my morning mapping out a route of where I would go today, some old preserved palaces and mosques mostly and also where I would meet Fatema for lunch. 

The morning went by without much issue. The most memorable thing that had happened to me was the harassment by the locals. On my way to one of the old mosques I had a man follow me through the street trying to guide me through the “dangerous” neighborhood I walked into, which looked no different from the dozens of other districts and quarters and neighborhoods I had walked through beforehand lined with shops selling everything from jackets to shoes and rugs. I did my best to ignore the man but he was persistent, and this will always become a running theme with any story you hear of Morocco, water is wet, deserts are sandy, Morocco you will be harrassed by locals trying to be your guide. The best advice I can give is do not ignore them, sternly and assertively tell them you aren’t interested and keep moving. This time I made the mistake of trying to ignore the man, much like I would a barker or amateur rapper trying to sell me his mixtape on the streets of New York City.

In my experience this is just an invitation for them to keep bothering you, because you have not explicitly shot them down. After ten minutes of trying to ignore the man and get to my next destination I turned around frustrated and told him to leave alone and didn’t need his help. Without much fuss he said something to me in Arabic which I imagine wasn’t very nice and disappeared into the mass of people behind me.

That afternoon I finally met Fatema for lunch, it was at a nice restaurant still in Medina. She was a tiny girl with dark skin, her short curly black hair in a bob. We immediately got to chatting about her living in Morocco. I wanted to get a better understanding of the culture from a perspective I hadn’t and would never be able to experience, which was a woman’s point of view. She explained to me this history of Morocco, from the original natives of the country, a desert nomad ethnic group called the Berbers, to the Umayyad Caliphate coming in and conquering the country in the 8th century and introducing Islam and the Arabic language to the country, then how the French came in the early 1900s and did the same thing to the Arabs. She explained she identified as a Berber first and Moroccan second and there was a clear divide in the culture and upbringing of a people who had been trampled on for so long. If you know anything about the history of the world then this should come as no surprise. I’ve heard stories and read about similar situations all over the world, from the United States treatment of the Native American population, to the English settlers did to the Aboriginals in Australia and Maori peoples of New Zealand, Dutch colonizers in Indonesia, or the Spanish Empire to all of Latin and South America and the Philippines. It seems genocide, wiping of cultural identities, erasing of history in exchange for the opportunity to live were just the norm in those times. I’m so grateful to live in a century where this doesn’t happen anymore and everyone gets along and accepts different places that may be different than their own, and doesn’t commit mass murder against local populations of innocents for the land, resources or whatever value it may have.

After that educational lunch Fatema and I continued exploring the city, and at one point we ended up stopping in a clothing shop as I had expressed my desire to stop in some shops and buy some stuff. Fatema lit up with excitement and we ended up going into one of the shops in the Medina close to where I had bought my jacket the night before. However this time I was left in awe at Fatema’s ability to haggle and talk back to the merchants. She was confident, steadfast and stern with the merchants, I had no idea what was being said as both of them would be speaking Arabic but she made it clear she wouldn’t back down from whatever they were saying, I had my eyes on a rustic leather satchel, and within a few minutes of back and forth she managed to get the merchant to sell it for virtually nothing under the guise that I was buying it for her, not for my own use. Locals always get the special treatment and discounts in places like this and Fatema had the courage to use that for my own advantage. Her ability to maintain this composure against a culture that did not take her seriously is so commendable and gave me a newfound respect for her and any woman growing up in this sort of atmosphere.

Afterwards we went into a different shop that sold “Traditional Moroccan Clothing” and things went a little off the rails. I had went in with the intention of just buying a shirt, something to add to my casual wardrobe, and through the coaxing of both Fatema and the merchant selling the clothes walked out of the shop wearing a full suit of Moroccan wedding clothes, and to be honest at first I felt pretty confident that I looked the part of an adventurer blending into the local customs and culture, but as I walked around the Medina with Fatema I began to feel a sense of insecurity wash over me. I wanted to tear the clothes off and retreat to my room in the Riad and I couldn’t figure out why. I got the clothes for an absolute bargain due to Fatema’s haggling, but I couldn’t help but shake a feeling of discomfort. Then it hit me, there wasn’t a single Moroccan dressed like this. As the day went on I began to observe the locals more and more and as we explored the Medina together I became more and more uncomfortable realizing the only idiots dressed in Moroccan clothing were the white tourists such as myself. On occasion a barker or merchant would be wearing some article of clothing that would be identified as “Berber” or “Moroccan” but they were always trying to sell the clothes. When I would stare at the locals walking the streets they were wearing western styled clothing, Nike, Adidas, sneakers and jeans. I felt so stupid and silly I told Fatema I was going to go back to my Riad to change into my street clothes again. She was very disappointed as I believe she found the clothes quite fitting to me, and was quite proud to be walking the streets with such a trophy as myself, buying her things, I remember the looks she was getting from other men in the medina for walking with me and I wasn’t sure if it was jealousy or disapproval. Probably a combination of both. 

That evening I ended up taking her to dinner at some restaurant not worth the mention as a thank you for her help and guidance for the day, and then saying goodnight and goodbye as I had intended. Tomorrow morning I would leave Marrakesh with no intention of returning with my eyes shifted to the highlight of my time in Morocco; a trip to the Sahara Desert. The second half of my plan for Morocco had been the realization during my research that I did not possess the skills or the confidence to get myself there alone, I didn’t know any Arab, French or Spanish, and through my research of Morocco made the decision I would need a guide, I had no idea how public transit worked or even if it was a thing here, and didn’t wait to leave anything to chance, as I had a somewhat tight schedule to keep. I settled on a private tour with a group named, “Berber Dream Tours” who I found through a couple on youtube who had worked with them. I had messaged the couple to get their thoughts on whether the tour was worth the money and I ended up with a 5 day itinerary that involved Berber Dream Tours picking me up in Marrakesh, a two day drive down to the Sahara Desert for a two day camping experience and then a days drive up to Fez, my second city of Morocco. 

So I had the next five days set up for me, it should be a fairly simple thing with little to no thought on my part, just faith in my guide. I put the last 48 hours into the back of my thoughts, the city of Marrakesh, Fatema, the annoying merchants and tour guides, ready to check an item off my bucket list, and the entire reason I came to Morocco. Seeing the Sahara Desert.