The Only Full Day I Have Ever Spent in Africa

We woke up to a wet hotel in a wet city called M’Diq. (Twenty-year-olds are not too old to make uncultured jokes about the name M’Diq.)  I had fallen asleep in on damp pillows in a hotel room with a finger-sized lizard on the window. Everything was moist and still, we were thirsty, and brushing our teeth with water bottles from Spain.

After a quick “American-style” breakfast (apparently, we eat ham and yogurt and croissants and juice every morning, right?), we boarded our buses for Tetouan, city #1 on the tri-city adventure. Our tour guide never introduced himself and gave a couple shpiels throughout the day but the city told its own story in seconds. One: The nameless tour guide told us not to take pictures of the police or they will come and delete your memory card. Two: We looked naked compared to everyone on the streets. All eyes stared us fortysomething shouting Americans down the streets. Three: In a moment, we walked through a horseshoe-shaped gate and went back a thousand years in time.

His highness' household. Sort of like a vacation home on the northern coast. 

Flip-flops and cobblestones are not friends, which I should’ve figured out between Sevilla and Paris but it never hit until my feet were not just pained but also disgusting from the absolute squalor of Tetouan’s medina. Since Jews and Muslims built the tiny winding streets together in 1500, homeless cats have used the city as their toilet and the smell was somewhere between rank and putrid. 

Welcome to Gaza?

As we walked down “Gaza” street, the blocks shrank and the walls grew. We were in a maze. Reason #3569 not to travel to Morocco without a guide. You’d never get out.

We stopped in a spice shop for a sexy tourist demo of various spices and oils and perfumes typical of Morocco, all to be sold in a tacky auction style at the end. We then walked to a carpet shop, also with no identified signs or directions, where they did the same shtick, rolling out rug after rug, some gorgeous, some hideous. Tribal prints just aren’t my thing. Since no one bought anything there, I guess I’m not alone in that. Hand-woven shawls started at 140 euros. Ha. I’ll stick to Target’s home section.

I think this was tea with absinthe.
Still not sure if that's legal.

We lunched on *surprise* soup and couscous in a swanky little touristic restaurant, complete with giant gourd-like guitar and singing man with leather drum duo. Then a tiny man danced and contorted himself with candles and tea on a tray on his head. It was weird but very impressive – he was much better than the last season of America’s Next Top Models, who epically failed at a similar task in one of the final rounds. This guy would’ve beaten all the models.

We headed out of Tetouan and on to Tangier for some camels and caves. On the way, we witnessed two events that will forever demarcate Morocco in my mind. One: as we rode into the city, I noticed many young boys running alongside our bus, near our bus, towards our bus. And then my seatmate Livy gasped, “Ohmygod there’s someone under the bus.” Sure enough, the boys were climbing on back, top, and under our bus. First there was one, then two, then five, then estimates of twelve to fifteen fine gentlemen hitching some sort of ride with us.

When you realize that these people attacking your bus will do just about anything, like climb under a moving vehicle, to get out of their port city and into Spain, your heart paralyzes. When I was that age, I was deciding what my screen name should be and writing vocabulary stories for 6^th grade English in Mr. Hilpert’s class. These kids – they were jumping on tour buses with about a 0% chance of actually making it and a much higher chance of being seriously injured. As we wound up a mountain away from the port, some police chased the boys off and away (successful on the third attempt).

Farther up the mountain, our bus came up behind what looked like a giant protest, clogging the street. You don’t want to be stopped almost vertically on a Moroccan mountain ten minutes after you held your breath as little boys monkeyed all over your vehicle. Then, we saw the protest was actually a funeral procession of about fifty men in full traditional garb carrying a wrapped dead body. 

I was watching Al-Jazeera.   This was a New York Times photo. This was not real life.

Morocco's Sarah Palin residence:
"I can see Spain from my house."

Too much culture for a half hour planted us firmly in tourist central, atop a cliff overlooking the ocean, inside a grotto with a market and splashing waves, and finally, on camels off the highway.

Light at the end of the tunnel. Hercules' Grotto.

My mom had just been talking about how she didn’t let my sister ride a camel at a gas station in Israel once because it was dirty and stupid. Well, this was dirtier and stupider. Also, the gut-wrenching noise of a camel not wanting to stand up as a man smacks its knees and neck is as heartbreaking as watching little boys climb under a bus coated in soot. Actually, it’s a worse noise. It sounded like how I imagine a dinosaur crying.

Still, I got on that camel, and a man shepherded me around in a circle as I yelled, “PETA does not approve.”

As the sun set over the ocean, we took romantic group photos and headed back to our hotel for dinner and raging. My program was going to have a fiesta and we definitely did just that.

Camels in their natural habitat. A parking lot.

Junior Year in Spain with Sweet Briar College takes over Morocco.
We looked way less organized about four hours later.

Some people went to a discoteca that was discovered to be exclusively for Moroccan men and prostitutes. While not there, I masterfully broke a beach umbrella while hanging with my friends by the pool after an energetic dance party with our tour guides. I tried to ask the front desk man if he’d seen a key a friend had lost and because of his lack of English combined with his lack of teeth, I had no idea if he had the key or any idea what I was saying. 

Overall, the night was good and with a two-hour time difference, we were in bed by two and happy with our safe-inside-the-hotel fun.