ChrisCrossesCountries

Cafe Baba was a revelatory experience, which wasn’t what I expected from the simple act of looking at some pictures, drinking some Moroccan tea and the contact high of all the hashish being smoked, which may or may not have caused me to lose track of time as I found myself staring into the oblivion of my teacup for several hours. Before I could recognize it, evening was upon me and the cafe was closing up, so I began slowly retracing my steps back to the hostel. 

By this point even though this Medina was completely different than the others in Fez and Marrakesh I was strangely familiar with it by now, it was still a maze of confusing paths and unmarked streets with shops and their wares sticking out of every window and door as I stumbled across the city. The next few hours are a bit of a blur to memory, mostly due to the hashish essentially putting me on my ass more than I thought it would. But I do remember that I managed to get back to my hostel with no major issues.

Something that caught me off guard with my hostel here in Tangier was the lack of availability. Not in the sense that there were no hostels open, but that almost all of them were booked to capacity. The hostel I had for tonight had no beds available for my second night in Tangier, so I would have to leave first thing in the morning to cross town and check into the new hostel. That night was the first night I had been social with other backpackers and the irony being that even though I had been craving and hopeful for meeting like minded people, I don’t really recall when I look back on any genuine connections I made with the people in my hostel that night. A girl from Spain, a few people from France, a spattering of Englishmen. The gamble of any hostel is as much as sometimes we want to meet new people and build new connections. We can also completely misfire and end up with a random assortment of people that we just don’t or can’t relate to. This was one of those times.

That night was early to bed for me, the following morning I was checked out and ready to relocate and explore more of Tangier, and hopeful to make some sort of a connection, or revelation about what I was doing on the other side of the Atlantic. I exited the hostel and walked to the end of the alleyway till I got to an overlook of the Mediterranean Sea. As I stood there I made the mistake of making eye contact with one of the locals who had been standing nearby, he approached me smiling and I knew that he was going to try and speak to me. I wasn’t very interested in anything he had to say, and turned away and began to walk down the street towards where my new hostel was supposed to be.

“My friend! You are going the wrong way!” I heard from behind me. This one sentence was enough to ruin my whole day. I had been awake for maybe 20 minutes. I had showered, brushed my teeth and packed my backpack, walked outside and took in the viewpoint and now this guy was gonna try and swindle me to be my guide at 8 in the morning? I stopped dead in my tracks, “How the FUCK do you know where I am going?!” I shouted back. “Leave me the fuck alone, and mind your fucking business.” I began moving over to the man, who I towered over by a whole foot. 

I realize my temper which rarely shows itself won out here, and the next few moments definitely were not my best as a tourist. I think this action was the peak of my frustration with the country as a whole. I couldn’t even enjoy a moment of peace reflecting on the beautiful viewpoint of the Mediterranean Sea in front of me without someone trying to sell me something. I understood this was life as a tourist in Morocco, but it didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

After my insults landed on the man I turned back around and quickly made my way through the alleyways towards where my next hostel would be. As I walked I found myself increasingly worried and anxious that my insults would land me in trouble. I had forgotten that I was a foreigner in a foreign land. The locals had no compassion for me, or a reason to jump in if things had gotten physical with that guy just a moment ago. If he pulled out a knife, or threw a brick at me as I walked away, would anyone come to my defense? It’d be my word vs theirs, and no cop in their right mind would ever side with the stranger’s account of events. I needed to be more careful. I dropped my backpack, leather satchel and anything I wouldn’t need for the day with reception and began my exploration of Tangier’s Medina.

I checked out an old antique shop that Anthony Bourdain had visited when he came here, an old castle tower overlooking the bay where you could see the Mediterranean and had lunch at a nearby restaurant, and made my way back to the new hostel for check in. As I mentioned earlier, I was quite surprised by the amount of backpackers in Tangier, and the only room I was able to reserve at the time was a private double room, which was the second most expensive room in the whole hostel, which was also on the second floor of the three story building, and just off the main street into the Medina. If you had exited the building and made a left, you would be on the main street that leads to the business district of Tangier, where all the banks operated.

I unpacked the essentials, phone charger, toiletries, and clothes for tomorrow and made my way to the rooftop of the hostel, where the common area was located according to the staff. As I exited the stairwell to the top there was a large open-faced shed, with several couches and a small table in the middle, littered with cigarette butts and lighters. There was a somewhat large group of backpackers sitting on the couches, there was one spot open with the group and I slowly approached. Anxiety had hit me, as it would most in this situation. One thing that takes a lot of time to get over when you first start backpacking and hostel hopping is the fear of rejection, the attempt of putting your best foot forward and it not being good enough. The previous night I had been the rejector in a sense. I didn’t really fall in with that crowd, but it was by my own choice. Most of them wanted to sit around and smoke hashish and stare at the walls of the hostel, which wasn’t my vibe. This group was different. I could sense they were in deep conversations and there was one man in particular who was leading the conversation. 

He was white, with a North American accent, he was a little shorter than me, but then again most people were. Medium length dirty blonde hair in a bun and a scruffy beard, he had tattoos covering his legs and arms that I could see as he was also wearing the most bohemian stereotypical “gypsy” outfit you could imagine, he was barefoot with his feet on the table in front of him as he spoke. I immediately had a gut feeling I was going to not like this guy. It was instinct, I was already making up in my head as I walked toward the group my assumptions. “He’s probably a sovereign citizen, with no home and has been traveling for 11 years straight or some shit. Goes by some hippie dippie name that the universe gave him on an LSD trip in Bali.” 

As I approached he made eye contact with me and smiled at me, gesturing to the open seat, “Hi, I’m Sam, come have a seat.” He introduced me to the group and I sat down, expecting the conversation to continue with whatever story he had been telling everyone before I arrived, but instead I found myself the center of attention, something I wasn’t exactly comfortable with at that moment.

“So Chris, where are you from?” Sam asked. “I’m from America.” I said vaguely, not really wanting to engage with him. “Oh cool, I am too, where in the US?” Sam said quickly, keeping the conversation on me. “Jersey.” Sam’s eyes narrowed and he leaned in. “Where in Jersey?” “Ocean County.” 

Without skipping a beat Sam asked, “Where in Ocean County?”

“Brick.”

“Toms River.” Sam said and a smile grew on his face.
For those who are not experts in the geography of New Jersey, Brick and Toms River are two neighboring towns, and here on the other side of the Atlantic I had found a man  who had grown up in the same neighborhood as me, knew the same streets and places I hung out in. I found myself smiling and laughing. Immediately any of the negative feelings I had about this guy disintegrated under the bonding of both of us reminiscing about Wawa hoagies and Jersey pizza. To this day Sam remains the only person I met in two years of travel who was from the same part of the world I was, and is only a year older than myself, it’s such a weird coincidence that we had no mutual friends to speak of but could still connect on the locations of our childhood. I’ve met plenty of Americans but at a time I really needed to think back to home positively. Sam came in at the right time.

Now the truth with travel is that it humbles you in many ways. One of those ways people don’t really talk about is how you are always measuring your travel resume to someone else’s. The fact of the matter is that there is always someone out there who has been traveling longer, been to more places, done more than you, arguably done it better than you could ever hope to. Sam is this one. There’s no comparison to the way he has lived his life in relation to travel. Sam works at one of the dozens of National Parks in the US from April to October, and at the end of the tourist season, buys a plane ticket somewhere and spends the next five to six months traveling around some part of the world. He’s done this for nearly ten years. When I met him in Tangier he had just finished hitchhiking down to Morocco’s neighboring country of Mauritania, crossed the border and rode a semi-famous Iron Ore train back to the border into Morocco. This train is famous because it crosses into the Sahara desert and there is no lodging on the train, you just hop on like the hitchhikers of old, sitting on the top of the open carriages of ore, and then hop off when you get to your destination. Sam retold his story of the bitter cold nights and blazing heat in the daytime, the fear of running into bandits, running out of food and an adventure of trying to find tampons for his travel partner in a ultra-conservative Muslim majority country. 

Sam then spent most of the next hour talking about stories hitchhiking through South America, which is what he was doing before he got to Morocco, his time in the Philippines and how he was mugged in an alleyway at knifepoint, how he lived in Albania for 11 months and so many different stories that to this day I’m envious of and wish I could do them all justice and tell them fully and accurately.

I didn’t really put it together until a few weeks after this conversation but Sam gave me the final piece to the puzzle I was looking for with the questions that had been bothering me since London with these stories.

There’s levels to traveling like this. I’ve broken it down to three different paths. The first is your standard issue Holiday/Vacationer, who goes to the Caribbean, Miami Beach, or Mallorca and sits in the sand with a cocktail in hand and gets a tan, eats some good food and comes home. Second is your Traveler/Tourist, there are a few subcategories here but the main one is your standard issue Tourist. Some people will travel and their interest is history or sightseeing, they want a selfie in front of Big Ben, or the Eiffel Tower. They want the world to see them and where they’ve been. They want to sit in a cafe in Paris and have coffee while the people walk by and feel enriched through that experience. This group also contains most backpackers, a sub-category above the standard issue Traveler, who’s main difference I separate through their own willingness to add risk and danger to their time moving around the globe, by staying in hostels and going to more “Out of the way” locations that are more off the standard issue traveler’s list, which is usually defined by places that have infrastructure and the resources to accommodate them. 

Which brings us to the third path, which is one I label the “Adventurers”. These are the Sams of the world. Your hitchhikers, your campers, your travelers who are taking on the most danger and the most risk, your do-ers, who want to summit Everest, who cross the Sahara Desert on top a train, who trek through the Amazon or ride on a bicycle from Los Angeles to Patagonia with nothing but the clothes on their back and a sleeping bag. They thrive in the unknown and take joy in it. They can do the standard issue travelers stuff of sightseeing or hang out on a beach but their true element is carving their own path from what you’d expect from a traveler. With that being said, usually something I’ve found with this group of people is they are also some of the most humble people about what they’ve done. They have nothing to prove to anyone. If you were to compare Sam’s social media presence to my own, you’d have no clue what Sam is up to on a day to day basis when he is traveling. Maybe you’ll get one or two photos on occasion but for the most part the Adventurers cannot be asked to dedicate to posting what they are doing on social media. Unlike your standard Travelers and Backpackers who will archive every square inch of a country on their Instagram stories. 

With time I would slowly put these pieces together but during my short time with Sam we spent a long conversation going over different tools of travel and the “Philosophy” of it all. Sam is a practical guy and much of what I saw in him that day was carried by me when I reflect who I was at the end of my traveling and my semi-retirement to Perth. Not so much jaded, but understanding that love/hate of travel and how Sam did it, how I wanted to do it was exhausting. There’s a lot of ugly to it, traveling does break your heart. It wears on you. I remember talking with him about my disappointment in Tangier and Morocco and Sam echoed a lot of my complaints, giving me the validation I desired. It wasn’t his favorite place and he understood my frustration with a culture that seemed to be designed to just hustle money from stupid tourists. 

That evening though with Sam and several others was one to remember. I managed to convince a small group of us to go out to dinner down the street near the financial district. Now if you remember we were all in Morocco during the 2022 World Cup, and Morocco was playing to qualify in the Semi-Finals, and during that dinner Morocco won the game and that night erupted into celebrations that haven’t been replicated since. As we exited the restaurant I remember a man running past us screaming at the top of his lungs with two lit flares as he jumped into a mass of crowd that began to form at the entrance to the Medina. Men, women, children, teenagers hanging out of cars and trucks shooting off fireworks. I found myself in a sea of people, standing in the center of a traffic circle on top of a city fountain taking photos and videos. It felt like it went on for hours, because it did. Eventually standing in by the fountains got old and we all began walking the streets watching the chaos unfold up close. We went back to the hostel and people were still running through the streets late into the night, which meant a mostly sleepless night for me, despite that though it was a genuinely authentic way to end my last night in Morocco, because in the morning I had a flight to Lisbon, and would start the European Leg of my trip.

The following morning I wasn’t able to say my goodbyes to Sam or any of the others at the hostel like I hoped, but managed to snag Sam’s Instagram and boarded my flight at the airport. Reflecting on the man I had just met, the journey I had just been on, and if it was worth it. When Anthony Bourdain traveled the world he had the backing of the Food Network, the Travel Channel and CNN. Fixers who would do the heavy lifting for him, set up meetings with important figures, activities to do for the show and the restaurants that he would go to. His only job was to show up and interview. I did not have that luxury, if you wanted to call it that. Everything I was doing was a concept of a plan, able to change at a moment’s notice if things went sideways.

When I look back at Morocco now, nearly two years removed from that country, I don’t think I’d go back, and if I had the time to do it differently I would. I wouldn’t have stuck to the cities, I wouldn’t have paid for a tour down to the desert, and I would’ve moved on much sooner. Unfortunately I wouldn’t learn any of these lessons till much later, as over the next few weeks I would get hit with a major obstacle of burnout and loss of direction. Like I said, I had ideas of plans and where I wanted to be but nothing concrete, nothing held me to Europe except curiosity and the desire to see old friends. 

Next stop was Lisbon, Portugal. I would be meeting an online penpal, and one of my dearest and closest friends I met online during Covid lockdown. His name is John. I was ready for a change in culture, cuisine and activities, and after a quick transfer in Madrid I’d be stepping off a plane and then a train to one of the most visually stunning cities I had ever been to.