In Which I Tour Many Fine Rural Moroccan Toilets

Like so many clichéd wanderers, I fled into the desert for a quest. I chose an easy desert country though—one that didn't seem too scary for a solo female traveler: Morocco. There were camels of course, and an incident at a Hammam (the incident stemmed from me not having a really clear picture of what is a hammam), but especially there was a great deal of bread and oranges and bus rides and catcalls. I rode a camel--at sunset and at sunrise, bargained for traditional Moroccan pants (which have already enjoyed much use on the streets of NYC), learned how to cook in a tangine, saw dead sharks piled up in a very traditional fishing port, learned the correct way to pour mint tea so that it reaches the desired level of frothiness, and joined in a rousing sing along of Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You in a seedy night club.

I knew that the Venn diagram of 1. People I know whom I think that I could enjoy travelling with and 2. Friends with similar time off and available funds, is an extremely slim margin (so I simplified and went alone). This was my first trip wholly alone from start to finish. I had had days here and there on past trips, and in London (as the archives here show) I had many solo mini trips around the UK, but this was just me for ten days, stepping off onto the African continent for the first time. I said that I wanted to have an adventure.

What makes something an adventure?  More often than not it’s just being routinely and consistently inconvenienced by the culture and the norms of a new place, but (and this is the key) having a good attitude about it. Fall asleep with exhaustion in the middle of the Casablanca airport and wake up with a cat napping next to you? Adventure! Men following you for blocks in the Essaouira Medina babbling in French? Adventure! Sand in your eyes and ears while sitting atop a dune in the Sahara waiting for the sun to set? Adventure! Shared rooms with a German girl who got up to use the bathroom five times in one night? Adventure! Riding atop the camel who is also carrying 11-12 bottles of wine? Adventure! (You get the idea.) Solo travel adds innumerable inconveniences on top of the usual ones. And worst of all, you don't have a companion with whom you can immediately complain. But on the other hand, you are completely free to make your own choices and mistakes and then spin them however you'd like when you get home. I am the hero of all my tales! 

A perfect trip is one that isn't worth talking about.  This was not a restful trip. I did get one afternoon reading poolside, but mostly I was using my brain to find things. Bathrooms of course, as the title suggests, but also ATM's, snacks, water, change, directions, hotels, Wi-Fi, clean clothes, perfect photo ops, etc. It was a chance to put aside all my work emails and daily woes for a more basic set of needs. Substituting usual anxieties with new foreign ones is a type of rest I think. I heard once I got back that quite a few people were worried about me. I think we’re supposed to be grateful when someone worries about us, right? I've never quite understood that. What value comes out of other people’s worries? The scariest thing that happened to me was when a hundred-year-old topless woman scrubbed an entire layer of skin off of my body and then quibbled in French about how much I owed her for that service before I could get my clothes back (the Hammam).

Somewhere up in the mountains, I realized that I probably should have given myself more time. I packed a lot into nine short days: Marrakech, then a guided tour out to the Sahara, Essaouira, and then back to Marrakech. It involved near constant moving since the edge of the Sahara is all the way on the eastern border with Algeria. Both Marrakech and Essaouira are on the western side of the High Atlas Mountains. I’d like to go back one day and go north to Fez and to the blue city. Someday it might be nice to take a boat from Tangier to Gibraltar and on to Spain/Portugal. (It’s a symptom of travel that you can’t help but spend half the time planning your next trip even while you experience the current one.)

At one point, as I was hopping over sandbags to cross the river down near the gorgeous UNESCO site Ait Ben Haddou, I felt like I was in another world. Nothing was pulling me down except gravity. Seeing my giant smile, my cute guide turned to me and asked if I was married or engaged? 

"Do you see any rings on these fingers?" I retorted saucily. 

"So why are you single?" He asked (Moroccans are nothing if not blunt).

"Well, it could be my terrible personality. But I think it's also that I never wait for anyone to catch up. I just keep walking."