Bread, Smoke and Strangers: Morocco With a Small Group

It started in Casablanca, at the welcome meeting. A room, a tour leader, and a group of adults performing friendliness at one another. The usual opening questions went around. Nobody remembers the answers. Nobody is supposed to.

I sat there trying to attach names to faces and losing.

Then we went to dinner, and the food did the work small talk can't. Skewers off the grill. Flatbreads torn and passed down the table. When you have to reach across a stranger for the bread, the stranger gets a little less strange. By the end of the meal the conversation had loosened. People stopped introducing themselves and started talking.

Nothing magic happened. We ate together, and that's how it usually starts.

Blue walls and mountain bread

Chefchaouen is the blue town, and yes, it's as photographed as you've heard. The reputation arrives before you do. You half expect it to disappoint you, and it doesn't.

Our leader walked us through it first, enough to know which way was down. Then we were cut loose, and that suited me fine. I wandered. Blue stairways, blue lanes, pots set outside doorways. A town people actually live in, painted in a colour the rest of us came a long way to stare at. I found a café, ordered mint tea and sat with it far longer than any itinerary would have approved.

A tour that gives you that, an hour with nowhere to be, is a tour worth taking.

The day I think about most came on a longer hike into the Rif. There was frost, which I had not expected. Morocco, apparently, does cold.

We stopped for lunch at a farmhouse with an Amazigh family. Bread was cooking in a pan over coals, and someone showed me how to press the dough flat with my hand. I tried. They laughed. Fair enough. I had it coming.

Then they fed me anyway.

The bread was hot and smoky, the tea was sweet, and most of the conversation happened with hands and faces and goodwill. I didn't understand everything. It didn't matter. You can travel a very long way to see famous things and end up remembering a kitchen.

Surrendering in Fes

The medina in Fes is a labyrinth. I decided early on that I would memorize our route.

That went about as well as you'd expect.

Lanes narrowed, opened up, bent back on themselves. I kept trying to fix landmarks in my head and kept failing. Somewhere in there I quietly admitted defeat and just followed our guide, like a man who has accepted his station in life.

It turned out to be the right call. Once I stopped navigating, I could actually look.

You smell the tanneries before you see them. It's strong, it's sharp, and it follows you. It got into my clothes and stayed there long after we'd left. Fine by me. It's good for a visitor to be reminded that someone's work happens inside his photo op, and that work doesn't smell like a candle shop.

We ate in a riad, a proper meal at a proper table. And there was time to wander on my own, a little braver and no better at directions.

The long road and the tired legs

Here's the part the brochure skips. Morocco is big, and a lot of it is the distance between the famous bits.

There were long drives. Mountains, villages, and then the red rock on the way toward Dades Gorge, the kind of view that makes staring out a window a legitimate way to spend an afternoon. We got out and walked. On the road, conversations carried on for hours.

It's also tiring. You pack, you unpack, you move on. Being curious all day wears you out, and by evening, some days, I had nothing left but an appetite.

So if a trip like this tempts you, look hard at the days in between. Be honest about how much road you can handle before you turn into a worse version of yourself.

What saved me were the quiet stretches. At Bin El Ouidane we stayed by a lake, and I spent time on the terrace with tea and a notebook and absolutely no plan. In Marrakech we had a free day. I went to Jardin Majorelle and Jardin Secret and drifted around at my own pace, then met everyone for dinner. Time alone, then the group. That rhythm worked for me.

Sand in everything

By Merzouga, the strangers from Casablanca had become familiar faces.

We drove out, switched into 4x4s, and rode into camp. Then camels into the dunes. There is no dignified way to look at yourself on a camel, so I didn't try.

The sun went down over the sand, and the light did things I won't try to describe because I'd only embarrass myself. Back at camp there was music and tea, and later more stars than a city person is equipped to deal with. A landscape that size can make you feel very small. Sitting in it with people you've eaten with for days makes it a little easier.

Later, I tried sandboarding. Joyful humiliation is the only honest term for it. The desert had already given me perspective. The board took care of my dignity.

What sticks

Travelling with a group doesn't mean you all become best friends. Some of the people you meet will stay in your life. Others will belong to that trip and that country and nowhere else, and that's fine. They were good company when it counted, at the table, on the road, out on the sand at sunset.

When I think about Morocco, the blue streets and the dunes come up first, because they're supposed to. But the bread comes right after. The frost. The tea. A family laughing at my technique and handing me lunch anyway. A dinner table in Casablanca where nobody knew anyone, and a camp in the desert where, somehow, everybody did.

Read my full Morocco travel journal, including photographs and stories from the journey.