5 Stories That Sum Up Moroccan Travel

 

The best way I can think to describe traveling in Morocco is as a worthwhile challenge. You already know the worthwhile part. The country is absurdly beautiful and shockingly varied. Cities bream with bazaar energy, crisscrossing corridors, and nostril-dilating odors. Outskirts rise into lofty mountains and extend into infinite deserts. Historic encampments either emerge from mounds of sunburnt clay, or virtually glow with serpentine blue resplendence. But all of that, of course, must be earned. Which is where the challenge comes in.

Across all of the different travel hardships Megatrip threw our way, from carrying months worth of luggage through crashing waves to a rapidly departing longboat, to a simple post-dinner homeward drive turning turbulent as a flash flood transformed 90% of Windhoek into full on rapids, to the concerning amount of seat-less toilets in Italy, Morocco will always stick out in our minds as the most difficult place we went on our trip. Which is to say, the country straight up kicked our asses.

And before I go much further, I feel this is the right time to clarify that we aren’t exactly pampered tour group travelers who have never dealt with a dishonest salesperson, or unwanted advice, or a seemingly helpful local leading us 30 minutes into the Caribbean slums under the guise of guiding us to moped fuel. Moroccan travel speed bumps felt different. They were less trivial inconveniences and more subdermal parasites. It was a step beyond tuk tuk drivers flocking to you like mosquitos to a light, or touts following you across the street. It was an abstract feeling of constantly needing to be guarded and vigilant. The feeling that any information we received was a trick. The feeling that every warm welcome, every dazzling vista, every storied alleyway, carried with it a hidden price tag, an implicit debt which could be paid in actual money or emotional capital, whichever was more vulnerable at the time.

Morocco seeps into your psyche to the point of making you question your day-to-day reality. Which I suppose, overstatement or not, makes it the perfect travel destination. If the goal is to push yourself beyond your boundaries and knock your brain out of its comfortable rhythms, then there are certainly places less gorgeous to do it than here.

So both as an attempt to explain the absurdity of what we experienced, and as a form of bootleg therapy, here are five stories that bring us as close as we’ll likely get to summarizing Moroccan travel. This is far from comprehensive, but it’s the best we can do to try make sense of the glorious highs, the searing WTFs, and the memorable rugs. Which of course isn’t a promise that we’ll arrive at any meaningful conclusion. Read at your own risk. Unlike us before traveling to Morocco, you’ve been warned.   

ID Crisis

Our mere arrival to Morocco was a prophetic series of events in its own right. A perplexing harbinger of the days to come, not so much in terms of travel mishaps, but in how those typically manageable setbacks managed to get under our skin and efficiently baffle our souls. After a 24 hour flight deposited our meal-deprived bodies in Casablanca, our connecting flight to Marrakech was delayed, leaving us with about 3 hours to kill in a terminal that looked like a hospital waiting room whose renovations abruptly stopped in the 80s. We were thirsty, starving, and groggy, and as fortune would have it there was a lone café in our holding pen of a terminal, which, as fortune would have none of it, only accepted cash in a currency we couldn’t acquire until we went through customs. So David went through customs. Then David went to an ATM. And then another ATM. And then an ATM that worked. And then David went back through security with about enough time to purchase a bottle of water and a piece of bread before we had to board again. But hey, airport stuff happens, especially on voyages of this intricacy, and now we were finally heading toward our ultimate destination.

Of course when we landed in beautiful Marrakech, not only did I have to explain why my passport had already been stamped earlier in the day (showing the half eaten piece of bread shockingly didn’t clarify things), but for some still undetermined reason, we also had to convince the extremely, and inexplicably, suspicious customs agents that Sara was indeed the person pictured on her passport. For about 20 minutes. This is also probably a good time to mention that the language barrier is tall and imposing in Morocco, and if you don’t spit French or Arabic with Lamarian dexterity you’re going to have moments of complete communicative standstill (moments, by the way, that tend to occur precisely whenever this disconnect is advantageous to the locals). Add on the fact that even speaking English and armed with a pocket Websters, I’m not sure I could effectively explain that a person is the person in a picture of that person.

There’s no way to know what was actually going on here. It’s possible this was a bit of theatrical security posturing. Its possible that Sara, after over an entire day on a plane, looked so dehydrated, medicated, and feral that her photo bore little resemblance to her. But for reasons hopefully some of the coming stories will elucidate, I’m going to assume these trusty immigration officials were just plain old-fashioned fucking with us. Welcome to Morocco. Feel free to question the nature of your identity for the remainder of your stay.

Youth

There is no innocence in Morocco. Everyone has an angle. Everyone is hustling. Nothing is free. Part of what makes travel in the country so confounding is that there is no refuge from the dense, omnipresent sense of just thoroughly being worked. Not in the safety of your riad. Not in the privacy of your trans-mountain car transfer. And not in the friendliness of locals who shouldn’t be old enough to engage in such levels of deception. Children are permanent fixtures of mischief in the various medinas of Morocco, dashing through crowds with belittling agility, kicking soccer balls with suspicious intention, and always, always offering their two cents, usually in service of somehow attaining yours.

We had countless head-scratching interactions with the country’s youngest denizens. There was the boy who bashfully approached Sara in a dark Fez alleyway one night only to grab her hand, kiss it, and run away. There was the group of loitering youths who surrounded us in the medina demanding to know where were going and if we needed directions. Hardened as we were to the unreliability of this kind of interaction by this point, we brushed them off, only to have them proclaim that the very restaurant we were headed to was closed that day, and we shouldn’t be waking around that area. As something always did in this country, that struck a chord. Even if it was obvious that we were walking to lunch. Even if they happened to correctly guess our restaurant of choice by name, which was one of dozens of possibilities. Even then, why would they insist it was closed and warn us not to go? Why? Especially when it was fully open, perfectly safe, and bustling with happy customers? What was the end game here? Was it just to have me mentally process and later physically type all of these damn question marks? Fair enough, kids. Here’s one for the road?

The interaction that really threw us though, the one that actually got me to lose my outwardly facing cool, was when a child demanded we pay him for a picture I took of Jama El Fna Square in Marrakech. It was sunset. The dinner stalls were being erected by the dozen, smoke was rising from open grills in preheat, and the open space of the square was teeming with hundreds upon hundreds of busy people. The activity was electric and intoxicating. The lighting was golden and askew. And I decided to document the moment by taking a picture of it all. The thing about Morocco, though, is that you can’t consider the “all” without individually satisfying the composite “its”. Which is why the moment I took a picture of the entirety of the scene, a young boy wearing traditional black and gold garb bolted from 50 yards away, deep within this ocean of people’s Marianas Trench, upturned hat extended in his hand, and demanded I give him money for taking a picture of him. This would be like a brush stroke taking credit for the Mona Lisa’s beauty. Or one rapper claiming to be the star of the Wu Tang Clan. My moment of wondrous appreciation was sullied. The beautiful liveliness of the evening was tainted. So I did what any respectable adult would do, and I screamed in a strange foreign child’s face to shut up and get the hell away from me. Which, of course, he didn’t. Everyone has an angle. And apparently mine wide enough to avoid a fee.

Rock Star

Most of the travel oddities in this post take place in cities, and for good reason. They are indeed the distilled and fertile petri dishes for one of the most indelible, unforgiving, and irresistible tourism industries on earth. But even outside the medina walls, even without the bustling crowds of the souk, even in the middle of damn nowhere, Morocco doesn’t pass up a chance to throw curve balls that screw with you in long lasting ways.

Our second major destination in the country was one of the most unique. Over four hours drive from Marrakech, past speeding truck beds full of crying, hogtied goats, over casual 14,000 foot mountain ranges, across sandswept flatlands, lies a enclave of ancient clay dwellings so distinctive and photogenic, Hollywood has it on speed dial. Ait Ben Haddou is an irregular layer cake of primitive cube structures, constricting passages, and retrofitted teahouses all lovingly crafted from once-wet earth. It’s iconic, breathtaking, and it’s the only reason anyone in the vicinity is remotely close to said vicinity.  

While this remoteness arrives on the wings of adventure, it sticks around in the scraggly nest of inconvenience. The lodging situation for anyone who wants to see Ait Ben Haddou is largely a guessing game. Booking portals were scant on details regarding proximity to the site in question, and while our riad was a lovely adobe boutique on a hill overlooking the ruins, actually getting to them involved traversing a dead-end-strewn, and likely snake-harboring riverbank, or walking 20 minutes on the side of a highway. Having had our fill of snakes in the salespits of Marrakech (more on that later), we opted for the highway. The anticipatory walk to the ksar was unmemorable insofar as a stroll down a North African desert highway against what felt like gale force sand winds can be. The visit to the site itself was so glorious, captivating, and abbreviated (because of the sand winds) it would necessitate another less blustery walkthrough the following day. But after all of that, there was the road back. And with no taxi within starvation distance, we once again got to walking.

And this is when Morocco, thinking it prudent to remind us who it was, dropped something truly peculiar in our path. Now, in the ever-expanding alternate dictionary of travel-specific couples’ vernacular Sara and I have developed, etymologized, and conjugated over years of visiting strange places, the word “friend” is one that spiked in usage during the multi-month freak fest of Megatrip. “Friend”, although it has one simple definition, can be used in two very different contexts. The word, at least its travel-borne derivation, refers to an encountered animal, specifically one who appears amiable, adorable, non-threatening, and otherwise benign or benevolent. Use it in a sentence? “Oh look, a dassie! It’s a friend!” or “Baby elephants are the ultimate friends,” and so on. So outside Ait Ben Haddou, when we saw three emaciated dogs with arched spines, sporadic bald spots, drooling mouths, and awkward limps, lumber into the middle of Interstate Only Option, we had arrived at context number 2. Used it in a sentence: “Uhhh, those dogs do not look like friends.”

Now, intimidating wild dogs are hardly specific to Morocco. But what happened next definitely was. As the non-friend dogs saw us approaching from about 20 yards away, they stopped in the middle of the road single file and stared at us, equally spaced to cover the width of the pavement, allowing for only biting-distance gaps between them, a veritable border checkpoint between us and the Municipality of Lyme Disease, the album cover to Rabie Road. And as we stood there deliberating our next move under the dogs’ watchful, bloodshot eyes, a man appeared out of nowhere on the side of the road screaming at us in Arabic not to move any closer. “No, no, no!” he shouted with a rapidly waving index finger and outstretched vertical palm. He pointed at the dogs and made the same arm gesture an umpire makes for “safe!”, but that in every other situation means the exact opposite. I think this was Arabic for “not friend”.

Equally terrified and obedient, Sara and I did the only thing that seemed to make sense, which was of course absolutely nothing. Once the man was assured we wouldn’t attempt to breach the canine barricade, he started urgently searching on the ground around him like he had just dropped his keys. A moment later he stood back upright armed with several dusty rocks in his hands. He first cocked his arm back threateningly at the creatures, and when this elicited zero response from the dazed, frothing, pack, he unloaded. The first rocks landed several feet in front of the dogs, who appeared to mentally wake up when this unexpected external stimulus thudded into their immediate perimeter. They jumped back, but in a testament to how determined they were to block our route, it took about 5 or 6 more rocks to get them to actually leave the road and regroup in the sandy depression to the side. The man crossed the road to where they had fled, picked up another deterrent rock, and then looked back our way to motion for us to proceed. We walked forward with confused caution, like two children tiptoeing to the living room as their parents begin to fight in the kitchen. As we passed the man, who was still keeping a vigilant eye on the hovering mutts, we thanked him. We had been pit against a set of deranged fur monsters in the middle of nowhere, and this humble, valiant stranger had come to our rescue. He was our hero. Then, in the least surprising moment of the afternoon, he put out his hand and demanded compensation. Which, rattled by the experience and conscious of the brief window in which we had to pass before the beasts returned with reinforcements, we gave him.

And this how we paid a man to throw rocks at dogs in the middle of a Moroccan desert. Now as tense as the situation felt, it absolutely occurred to us, nearly immediately after, that this man, heroic as he seemed at the time, may have been running the most ingenious scam of all the countless scams we witnessed in Morocco. He does up his own dogs to look barbaric, maybe even shaves a patch of hair off here and there, trains them where to stand in the road, and uses a few tossed stones for the conditioned command to scram, and then collects his reward. Which is at once the most basic dog training anyone could ever pay to see, and also salient evidence of how deep inside our heads Morocco was at this point. The mere fact that this was even considered a legitimate possibility speaks to how acutely this country had already altered our thinking. But much like everything else in Morocco, there’s no way to know for sure. So maybe hero isn’t the right word for this roadside rubble hurler. Perhaps we’ll just go with friend.

Embrace

Travel is a world of salespeople. From the algorithmic huckster taunting you with his infinitesimal airfare fluctuations, to the hotel receptionist attempting to charge you for movie rentals that I swear, honey, were not mine, to explore the world is to knowingly and gleefully dance in a minefield of money bombs. And of course, salespeople are part of Morocco’s claim to fame. You’d be hard pressed to find a guide book write up that didn’t include some variation of the phrase “put your bargaining skills to the test!”, and to their credit, for the most part this indigenous breed of capitalism is a wonderfully disorienting experience. The base knowledge that no price is real and that every discussion is a game is a deviously liberating conceit, and one in which the country relishes with zero restraint. But, there were several things we did not know about Morocco’s legion of peddlers that may have helped prepare us for a few of the experiences to come.

For one, they unionize. And not like a dues-paying, award-show-throwing worker’s guild. It’s more of a brotherhood of entrenched tradition and mutual support. One vendor’s sale is everyone’s sale. It strengthens the entire enterprise. So if you try to push back on the unwritten rules too firmly, you’re at the mercy of not only the seller you’re trying to negotiate with, but every other one within earshot, who will swarm you to insist you make good on what you never agreed to. Sometimes while threateningly holding live snakes in your face. In addition to copious amounts of saffron and cayenne, the whole medina industry carries a heavy scent of Darwinism. There is competition among the sellers, sure, but squashing deviant behavior that threatens the system takes top priority. The social contract is extensive. But it doesn’t make things any less nasty or brutish.

Secondly, and this definitely builds off the previous point, Moroccan vendors use cruelty as a weapon. Not all of the time, mind you. If you’re following their artfully constructed talk tracks like a money-bleeding locomotive, they’ll act like you’re invited to family Tajine Tuesday. But any significant deviation from this narrow gauge negotiation ritual, and they’ll respond with outright disgust. They’ll tell you to fuck off. They’ll spit in your direction. They’ll even flip the script and say that by ignoring their unwanted vies for your attention you are denying their humanity and stripping them of their self worth. And when you bewilderedly acknowledge their existence, they’ll smile and present you with a shitty scarf. The most sure-fire way to elicit a Moroccan seller’s wrath is to politely turn down interest. You’d think this kind of antagonism would harm the seller’s prospects, but therein lies its, still Darwinian, genius. It’s an evolutionary, strength-of-the-gene pool, approach. One seller sacrifices his deal and inflicts enough damage on the rogue customer to make him reconsider opting out of this mandatory social exchange in the future. And all of this throws typical preconceptions of sales-to-consumer interactions out the window. “Always be closing?” Maybe not if you think teaching a tourist a lesson about crossing medina merchants is more valuable for the greater good of the hawking horde. “The customer is always right?” Well the customer is always thinking about the concept of “right”, what it even is, and if it ever had any meaning. Which renders most traditional forms of evasion, from angry scowls to a smiling “no thank yous”, hopelessly inert.

And lastly, the fact that will finally bring us to the story in question, Moroccan vendors aren’t afraid to touch you. Which despite everything I’ve already written, truly caught me off guard. Throughout the aforementioned psychological warfare these cunning titans of industry waged on us, there was always the mental bastion of knowing that, aside from being cajoled in to unwanted monetary separation, an unspoken physical line existed that wouldn’t be broached. They could curse, spit, and brandish serpents all day. But this was exaggerated salesman histrionics. Arrested Development “no touching” rules were certainly in tacit effect. But alas, like all assumptions held prior to entering this dog eat cous cous world, this wasn’t the case.

On our final Marrakech night, following our second Jama El Fna meal at stall #10, we took a digestive stroll on the outskirts of the culinary madness, people and food watching in equal measure. There was one area where two columns of food stalls constricted into an unquestionably purposeful bottleneck, and the menu-slinging hype men laid in wait, prepped to prey upon any unsuspecting foreigners foolish enough to amble through this crucible of susceptibility. It started out simply. “No sorry, we already ate!” “We’re stuffed, thank you though!” But before long we were pinballs bouncing from sample plate bumper to “best food here!” paddle until eventually we ricocheted straight into one of those special-event-inducing trap doors. The event in question was a distinctively enormous food stall promoter who began by placing his hand on my left shoulder to direct me to his indistinguishable grill of employment. I made the usual smiling, pleasant, refusals and pulled back from his, already wildly inappropriate, hand placement. But much like a Chinese finger trap, and much unlike unprotected sex, pulling out was my first mistake.

His once simple shoulder clasp instantly morphed with my resistance into a half-body, arm-around-the-shoulder move pointing me in the direction of his stall’s rendition of the same shit everyone else was cooking. Growing deeply impatient, but still Minnesotan at heart, I now forcefully walked against him to my left, still spouting increasingly silly politesse about the contented status of my appetite. Which of course was what this budding restaurateur was waiting for, because now he closed in on my right side, placing me in a full Moroccan bear hug while inching me closer to the stall at which he was apparently under quota. And look, nothing gets me hungrier than being completely enveloped by men I don’t know, but it had been a long day, I had a stomach full of harira, and the easiest accessible alcohol was sitting in a duty free bottle hidden in my riad. So with as much Midwestern tact as I could muster, I pushed against this grown stranger’s increasingly tight embrace, my left palm on his shoulder, and leaned as far away from him as I could. And then, in a moment I should have seen coming from the start, the man loosened his grasp on me just enough to posture over me and furiously scream not to put my god damn hands on him, how dare I touch him, I’m a visitor in his country, get your hands off me now. With his full arms still clasped around my back.   

When I finally escaped, deeply confused, slightly violated, and completely emasculated, a different menu man from a nearby stall, who must have been on break as he wasn’t berating anyone, smiled at us and said, “Can I offer some advice? You shouldn’t walk down this way if you’re not looking to eat anything.” Yea, I’ll take that advice. How much?

In the end, the whole experience made me feel like, I don’t know, lets say a Moroccan boy who just got yelled at by a shitty American who wouldn’t pay for the picture he clearly took of him. This country does stuff to you. 

The Rug

This is the rug story. The rug story is not only the most emblematic Moroccan travel tale I can think of, but also one of our favorite stories of all of Megatrip. And it didn’t even happen to us.

Of the many remarkable Megatrip firsts Morocco can stake a claim to, being the home of our first featured artist is one of the most important. Our friend and fellow traveler Dan came hurtling into our strange adventure from one of his own, hopping from a family trip in Spain to meet us briefly in Fez the night before we left for Chefchaouen . To say Sara and I were excited to have a momentary 3^rd party is an understatement. When you’ve been attached to one other person every waking and non-waking minute for four straight months, the mere thought of spending time with someone else is revelatory.

So we planned to meet with Dan the night he arrived. Our riad had an unbelievable rooftop overlooking Fez’ labyrinth from an appreciable distance, so we were to play hosts. This of course required Dan to navigate from his Airbnb to us, which for someone who just landed in Morocco hours earlier is an enormous hurdle. Cell reception is scarce, the streets are arranged with a notable disdain for logic, and no one offering to help is to be trusted. But of course, Dan didn’t know this. So when a friendly local man offered to direct him to our location, and he accepted, he unknowingly set into motion a series of singularly Moroccan events that would extend well into the next day and end up costing him hundreds of dollars. I like to think back to this innocent moment and to just how easy a target Dan must have clearly been. How Caucasian and out-of-place did he look? How glaringly apparent was his still piping hot disorientation? How painfully obvious were his Midwestern sensibilities and all the vulnerability that, as we’ve seen, comes with them? In the end, the only answer that matters is “enough”. Dan obliged the friendly local and followed him dutifully to our riad door ten minutes away, where Sara was waiting for him with a warm welcome and a “who was that guy you were walking with?” The curiously convenient guide had already departed, no doubt looking for another tourist in need.

But for the time being all was well. We were three friends reunited on a rooftop in Africa, drinking contraband liquor, sharing travel stories, and taking in the breathtaking view. When Dan explained the means by which he had actually located our building, we responded with a barrage of cautionary tales, many of which I’ve shared in this post. We explained that he had been lucky to have even ended up at our place at all, recalling how just earlier that day, we had turned down advice from a man claiming to show us the route to Fez’s famous tannery. When we went the opposite direction of where he was pointing us, and then ended up at the tannery in a matter of minutes, we were left to only postulate where the hell he truly intended on directing us. We went further, diving into every piece of Morocco advice we could assemble from our brief but tumultuous residency up to that point. Don’t follow unsolicited directions. Don’t get rattled when you get verbally abused. Don’t touch anyone. Even if they have you in a headlock. It was an introductory medina travel primer, Morocco for and by dummies, and by the end of our night with Dan he was armed with more freshly obtained inside information than anyone could ask for. I mention all of this of course, to absolve Sara and I of any guilt in what ultimately ended up happening. We did our part. We gave Dan preparatory insight that the vast majority of first time travelers to the country, including us, have no idea they even need. And the fact that he chose to ignore literally everything we told him is beyond our control. You can teach a man to fish, but if that man decides to use the rod as a back scratcher, you can’t be held responsible when he starves to death.

The night went on. We wandered the medina maze under the stars, feasted on delicious street food, ran into that kid who appeared out of nowhere to kiss Sara. During this foray into city, Dan caught some diluted glimpses of classic hawker hostility as I was ardently scolded for gently declining to look at a menu here or a table there. We offered some “see what we’re saying” platitudes to which Dan proposed what would be his strategy for dealing with this madness in the coming days. Dan would A. Just ignore anyone that talked to him, and B. If A did not work, simply claim he had no money. I warned that strategy A, while functional in many conventional environments could backfire with ferocity in this land of heightened extremes (as I’ve already discussed). Strategy B did seem to have some legs, however, as without money a traveler is immediately stripped of all utility to a Moroccan vendor. Without money I would likely have been left unaccosted near the Marrakech food stalls, and potentially eaten alive by wild, well-trained dogs outside Ait Ben Haddou. God speed, we told Dan. Interested to hear how that works out for you.

And then we said goodbye, leaving Dan to retrace the benevolently provided steps back to his lodging. The next morning Sara and I would depart on a 3-hour journey (which could be an entire story of its own) to the blue city of Chefchaouen with Dan remaining to explore Fez on his own for the rest of his stay. It bears mentioning that Chefchaouen was both our final and favorite destination of Morocco’s Megatrip tenure. While instantly recognizable from bytes upon bytes of social media exposure, the real place not only makes good on the promise of an entire north African town with a dazzling toner malfunction, but it also surprises with steep mountainous surroundings, entrancing calls to prayer, and Spanish, actual spoken Spanish. All hail Gibraltar!

It was an appropriate reward for eight days of transcendence-punctuated strife. And it was within these cobalt confines, this sparkling blue participation trophy, this idyllic physical reflection of the relief-coated headspace we were occupying, that we received a text from Dan back in Fez. And it turns out this gem of a city wasn’t our only reward.

While we were enjoying tranquil cups of coffee in Chefchaouen’s main square, Dan was recovering from an inverse experience. Upon leaving his Airbnb in the morning to visit the tanneries, Dan was approached by a helpful local offering to show him the way. Immediately disregarding everything we talked about the night before, he acquiesced to the unrequested assistance, and within minutes found himself surrounded by angry Moroccans in the back corner of a souvenir shop being viciously berated into buying a rug he never once expressed interest in. And now Dan owns a Moroccan rug. 

Now the details here are very important. First, the helpful man who directed Dan into this bear trap of a rug retailer was the very same one who guided him to our riad the night before. This enterprising Waze substitute and carpet aficionado, had pegged Dan from the moment he saw him. He led him to our riad to establish confidence, literally waited outside his apartment all morning, pounced the moment he saw him, and cashed in on the goodwill he so artfully constructed the night before. To get him to buy a rug. The forethought and effort that went into all of this is astounding. This was an almost 24 hour con, complete with an initial trust building phase, a “chance” second encounter, a bait and switch, and a full court press. All to sell a piece of fabric. Which again makes me think back to how hard Dan must have been broadcasting “easy mark” the moment he exited his Airbnb the night before. Us travelers like to think of ourselves as explorers, as adventurers, as citizens of the world. But it’s healthy to remember that to a good number of people you run into on the road, you’re nothing but a future rug owner. And the fact that you don’t know it yet only makes it more true.

Second, Dan paid over $200 for this rug. That guy wasn’t going to put in those man hours without a worthwhile payout at the end. You don’t dedicate an entire day to scheming if there’s not a lucrative light at the end of the trickery tunnel. What happened to strategy B, you ask? Why not simply declare empty pockets for an easy exit? The shopkeepers made quick work of that. The moment Dan offered that he had no cash to pay for this overpriced cut of cloth, they offered an ATM around the corner from the store. And they followed him there observantly until he withdrew an amount they were satisfied with. Now it’s easy to look at this from the outside and say you would never have consented to this clear abuse of absolutely no power whatsoever. But in Dan’s very limited defense, when you’re in the thick of this scenario, rational thinking is a fleeting luxury. Every good idea you have is met with an instant retort, written eons ago in some sort of medina constitution you don’t have access to. However prepared you think you are is exactly the level of preparedness you’re meant to think you’ve achieved. The only way to sufficiently educate yourself is to take a class. That class costs over $200. And comes with a complimentary rug.

Third, and by far most important, the rug is a complete piece of shit. Even calling it a rug is entirely too generous. It’s a worn Moroccan doormat. A used Islamic dish rag. A trellised cocktail napkin. When our text conversation with Dan got to the point where he sent a picture of the rug, which was barely big enough for him to stand on, we had completely lost control, howling like lunatics in the middle of Chefchaouen’s town square. Here’s the best part though, the comical size of the rug was actually another tactic in the shopkeepers’ deep arsenal of manipulation instruments. As he was protesting with admirable futility, one of Dan’s initial excuses was that the carpet they were originally foisting upon him wouldn’t fit in his luggage to take home. No problem, they had a fix for that. Namely a much smaller rug. At the same price. It’s a move so audacious it kind of has to work. Imagine walking past a movie theater with no time, much less intention, to watch an entire film, and the theater counter-offering you a single scene viewing at full ticket price, acting like they are doing you an immense favor the whole time. I think I’d probably have to watch that scene out of pure respect for the attempt. In that sense Dan’s rug is a teaser trailer for travel in Morocco. It encapsulates the essence of exploring this bamboozling land while also hinting at intricacies you’d need to see for yourself to fully understand. The rug is not something that happened during travel in Morocco. The rug is travel in Morocco.

Ultimately, I think we look back at our Morocco-traveling selves now the same way we looked at Dan then. Other people woefully unprepared to handle this truly special corner of the world. And as I mentioned at the start, the challenge this post documents in excessive detail was wholly worthwhile, and likely a main reason we can’t get the country out of our heads. Morocco has a hold on us that, much like a restaurant promoter in Marrakech, isn’t likely to loosen up anytime soon. And if these final pictures taken last week are any indication, Dan is having trouble letting go as well.