Our extra-Fes excursions have been three-fold: to the nearby town of Azrou, to the Sahara Desert and to the small cities of Tetouan and Chefchaouen up north. Although the latter was an independent trip undertaken by just Cath and myself, the first two were organized for larger groups; together, I think that the trips encompass two rather distinct styles of travel.
In the case of Azrou, the organizers were two of the directors at MACECE, our Moroccan administrative body, and the group was the Fulbright grantees, whisked away from classes mid-week for a one-night retreat in the mountains. Two airport shuttle-esque vans picked us up right in front of the school, and for the next two hours we were able to relax in air-conditioned comfort -- laughing loudly, hollering in English to each other, dancing in our seats, sprawling without excessive concern over the exposure of a bare (female) shoulder or knee. In short, Morocco was right out the window, but the isolated environment of the vans allowed us to completely, if temporarily, ignore its mores.
This luxury continued as we pulled up to the Christmas light-bedecked hotel at which we were staying. Located some distance from the actual city of Azrou, it came replete with a swimming pool and Western-style toilets (versus squat toilets -- "Turkish," as they're called here). The only locals within our sphere of contact were those employed by the hotel.
Our afternoon activity likewise kept us at a distance from the inhabitants of Azrou, although it did allow us a look at the surrounding landscape -- the cedar forests for which the area is known. After several weeks stuffed up in a city, I think we were all grateful to breathe in fresh air and to be on the alert for tree roots rather than taxi cabs. (In the photo: Meghan, Anissa, Kristen and Cath joyfully demonstrating the yogic “tree pose.”)
We requested to spend some time in the town on our way back from the afternoon hike. The stopover afforded us was brief, however, and consisted only of being herded to the "artisanal market," where craftsmen demonstrated their techniques and touted their products to tourists.
Don't misunderstand me – I had a great time on our little getaway. Who, after all, doesn't enjoy a lunchtime fish eyeball-eating competition or stories of exorcisms from a MACECE director? It's just that we could have been anywhere for all that Azrou influenced our thinking or behavior. Traveling in a bubble like that can be dangerous if done too often, I think, because it involves no substantive contact with the place or its people; it doesn’t challenge you much at all, and so I don’t know that you end up expanding your mind in the way exposure to an unfamiliar culture should prompt you to do.
That being said, the trip to the Sahara could not have been much more over-the-top in its touristy-ness.
Reading the description of the four-star hotels at which the organizer – ALIF, our language school – planned to have us stay, both Cath and I initially wanted to throw up a little at the extreme pamperedness. Our interest in seeing the Sahara won out over this reaction, however, and so we temporarily parted ways with our principles, said a permanent good-bye to a tall stack of money and boarded yet another private bus, this time alongside a mixed group of Fulbrighters and American and British study abroad students.
It’s a long drive, to the desert. Seven, eight hours to our particular destination of Merzouga. On narrow, winding mountain roads.We did six on Friday afternoon, then spent the night at luxurious hotel number one, where a buffet, swimming pool, hot tub and itty-bitty “night club” awaited us. More than one person observed that the place felt like Disneyland – like a cartoon version of the Moroccan fortresses of yore.
During our leisurely Saturday morning, a small group of us decided to venture outside the citadel walls and take a walk up what is – apart from our sprawling hotel complex and another just like it across the road – a profoundly desolate stretch of highway. Fifteen minutes north, we came upon a small “town,” if it’s not too much of an exaggeration to refer to a dusty cluster of buildings as such. The area of the place was almost certainly less than that of our hotel. We wandered over.
Two children led us down the road, and several young women emerged from doorways to greet us with smiles. One beckoned us inside. It was a modest home, of course, but tiled and cool, and the salon she ushered us into had room for a group three times our five bodies. We chatted in halting Arabic, gestured to her little boy that we approved of his Ninja Turtles t-shirt and attempted to politely decline the offering of tea, dates and a wagon wheel-sized loaf of freshly baked bread.
It’s really not great manners to turn down food. We knew that. But we had to get back to our bus, and, too, there was the discomfiting nature of the whole dynamic – a group of foreigners sallying forth from the air-conditioned confines of their resort to swoop in on someone else’s home for all of twenty minutes.
Even though I hope our attitudes steered clear of the voyeuristic, there was just no escaping the reality of a power imbalance between this young woman and us. Indeed, as she walked us back out to the highway, she motioned insistently at the large and empty car washing business by the side of road, indicating that we should bring our vehicles back with us. We were an opportunity to make money. Not merely that, perhaps – I don’t mean to question her hospitality – but certainly wealth is a salient attribute with which many people here identify us.
Did we owe her something? What did we mean by visiting the town? I’ve pointed out the pitfalls of seeing Morocco from behind the windows of a personal van, but the truth is that exploring beyond them results in its own set of problems regarding the appropriate way to interact with the foreign environment and people.
There’s no how-to for these situations. I definitely don’t claim to have the answers. All I can say for now is that being respectful is important; being friendly is important; being mindful of the power dynamic at hand, also important.I suspect, though, that mindfulness can get out of hand: it can paralyze you, if you let it, and keep you from ever relaxing into interactions, from engaging on a personal, rather than a theoretical level with your surroundings.
Furthermore, doesn’t it disempower people? I mean: if I turn down proffered tea and dates and bread in an effort to manipulate the situation and circumvent the power imbalance, maybe even with the hope of extracting the profferer from it as well, don’t I just deny her agency, or the ability to decide for herself to whom to proffer what? Isn’t it condescending of me to say, essentially, that I see what’s going on here with this interaction, that there’s this imbalance of power and that you (profferer) want to work within it but I’m not going to let you because I’m uncomfortable with it?
At some point, you’ve got to be a person, and you’ve got to let other persons be persons, and you’ve just got to deal with the beautiful, heartbreaking mess that sometimes results when you all come into contact.
That is: smile and nod and enjoy the freakin’ dates.
It’s not like we had any trouble consuming them – and the rest of an extensive buffet lunch – at luxurious hotel number two, to which we drove next and which served as the launching point for the overnight camel trek that was the centerpiece of the trip.
Here’s what I have to say about camels:They are tall.
Their hind legs have backward knees.
They make sounds exactly – but exactly – like Chewbacca.
They have an unhurried, rolling gait that you can try to ease into the way you might into the rhythm of waves under a boat, but probably your butt is going to be really, really sore the next day no matter what.
We rode these loping, spindly beasts (saddle directly on the hump) for about two hours on Saturday evening, just as the sun was setting, so that by the time we arrived at an oasis furnished with lamps, tables, tents and mattresses, it was pitch black. The night, loosely facilitated by the same group of young men that guided us out there, consisted of drumming, dancing, banqueting and the climbing of a massive sand dune behind the camp.
It had been above ninety degrees that day, but by the middle of the night, the memory of the sun’s heat faded from the sand, and I was glad to have brought a sweater. The stars, needless to say, were astounding. There was no moon to see; the Islamic lunar month of Zu’lkadah was about to begin.In the morning, we got up in time to see the sun rise, and the dunes smoldered a reddish-gold on our early trek back to the hotel from which we’d set off. Sand dunes like these ones near Merzouga are actually atypical of desertscapes, accounting for only fifteen percent or so of the Sahara. The rest is flat, sun-cracked scrubland. Kind of a no-brainer, I guess, where to set up a camel tourism business.
Back at the hotel, we had a chance to shower (you wouldn’t believe the nooks and crannies that grains of sand can find their way into) before piling onto the busses once again. Eight hours and several harrowing mountain passes later, we returned to Fes.
That was Sunday night. Monday: four hours of class and a final exam. Tuesday: six hours of class. (Make-up sessions; don’t ask.) Wednesday morning: Cath and I caught a bus to Tetouan.
There are no trains to this northern city (population: around 320,000), but the busses run by CTM (Compagnie de Transports au Maroc) are generally really nice, lacking air conditioning but clean and comfortable.It took us about five hours to arrive at the spacious Tetouan station, where a Fulbright scholar named Eric came to meet us, along with his Swedish wife and their three-month-old baby, Al. A paper- and print-maker, Eric is spending the nine months of his grant displaying his art (some of which you can see here) at various galleries and venues around town and teaching classes (in French) at the local arts university.
His apartment is beautiful, with no less than three balconies overlooking the streets of the Spanish quarter and the mountains beyond; we couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant place to stay, especially once it became clear that the family’s hospitality extended to wine, olives, avocado and gouda sandwiches, pumpkin soup and vibrant conversation. Check.
I was especially interested to hear Eric’s impressions of the city – and to see it myself – given that it’s very likely I’ll end up moving there for the research part of my grant, which begins in late February.
Although Morocco is considered a Francophone country and the French colonial legacy here is widely known, it was the Spanish who established a protectorate up north (as well as in the far south) and them who left a profound imprint on the region. Indeed, it kind of began to tweak me out, the extent to which the ensanche, or “widening” as the Spanish part of town is called, resembles the cities of southern Spain. The colonizers did an eerily first-rate job at making their protectorate capital feel like home.On the other hand, I took an instant shining to Tetouan’s medina, which is sizable but not quite get-lostable and remarkably laid-back. The mildness of the atmosphere derived not only from smaller crowds than found in, say, Fes, but also, for Cath and I, from a near absence of other tourists and of the hawking and heckling to which we thought we had to resign ourselves here in Morocco. No joke. I don’t know if there’s a causality between the undiscovered-ness of Tetouan by travelers and this ability to walk through the streets without every man in a five-meter radius making you his business, but whatever the reason for the phenomenon, we were not complaining.
Such unexpected freedom makes for a strong argument to live in Tetouan, as does: the Spanish spoken there (more common than French on the streets), the ample library and archival resources, the surrounding mountains and the smallness of it (which would theoretically facilitate getting to know people). Most of Eric’s feedback related to his
school and the artistic community; apparently, it’s an unusually vibrant one for a city of this size – another bonus.The concerns I have are the smallness (paradoxically), although cosmopolitan Tangier is a hop, skip and a forty-five minute jump to the west, and the alleged conservativeness of the city. I’ve had a hard time pinning down exactly how this latter quality manifests itself in everyday life. So far, all I know is that there was a sort of vigilante justice incident here a couple years back regarding a purportedly homosexual social gathering and that the poor neighborhoods up the hill from the city center at one point yielded more boys taking off to join radical Islamist movements than any other site in Morocco (sorry, Mum; I didn’t mention that before). At the same time, Cath and I definitely noted less headscarves here than in Fes. So who knows? I have plenty of time to process all this new information before February rolls around, and it’s time to move.
One place I know I couldn’t spend much more than a weekend in, however, is Chefchaouen, where Cath and I went after three nights with Eric and the fam.
This small town is lovely – tucked into the northern mountains and nearly all of its medina edifices whitewashed and then painted varying shades of blue – but there doesn’t seem to be a single tourist or tourism company that omits it from their travel itinerary. In the main plaza of the medina, milling around or eating at one of seven restaurants all riffing on the same “Arabian Nights” kind of theme, the non-Moroccan faces outnumber the local ones by, I don’t know – five to one? A lot.
Cath and I made an attempt to sidestep the hordes by spending the better part of Saturday hiking around Jebel Kalaa, the mountain that sticks its jaggedy face out directly over the little blue streets, peering curiously down at the spectacle playing itself out with such self-absorbed intensity.The trail we were following was less than well-marked, but by heeding the pointed fingers of passing goat-herders and ignoring the beckoning ones of the local hash sellers, we managed to find our way and obey the urging of the town’s name – Chefchaouen, or “look at the peaks.”
Back in town, we took one glance at our dusty legs and decided that a visit to a local hammam, or public bathhouse was in order. I will write more extensively on these later. For now, I’ll just say that the small building, its tileworked walls slippery with steam, left us feeling refreshed and served as another welcome respite from the tourist hustle and bustle outside – as long as we didn’t look in any mirrors, of course.
This last idea – that a tourist can probably never truly escape the trappings of tourism – reinforces yet again the theme that runs through this posting, namely that travel is a complex activity. Is there a “right” way to do it? A “wrong” way? Was the independent trip to Tetouan and Chefchaouen really all that different from those to Azrou and the Sahara?
I have a sense that these are questions I’ll be pondering for the duration of my time here and probably for the rest of my life. The great news is that as I fumblingly attempt to arrive at any kind of answers, the most productive thing to do is continue traveling. Just not this weekend. Because I need a break.
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