Slow Travel

There are two ways to travel.  The first is to try to see as much as possible in the least amount of time and the second is to see fewer things and spend more time enjoying them.  Before coming to Morocco, I tended to adopt the first approach and could hardly sit still when traveling; but I’m slowly beginning to adopt the “slow travel” approach, as I found out over Fall Break.  During the week-long break, I and 3 American friends from my program decided we’d try to tackle Jbal Toubkal, which, at just over 4100 m, is the tallest mountain in Morocco and second tallest in Africa behind Mt. Kilimanjaro.  The trip seemed very easy on paper – we were just going on a short hike that my guide book said anyone in reasonably good shape should easily be able to finish in 5 hours – but when we actually got to Imlil (a small Amazigh village tucked away 2 hours south of Marrakech in the High Atlas Mountains that’s 12 km from the base of Toubkal) and started our hike, we quickly realized how underprepared we had been.  

Taking 8 hours to do a 5 hour hike may have been a bit excessive, but if we had just rushed through the trail like everyone else, we would have missed so much that we wouldn’t have even realized we were missing.  Exhibit A is our chance encounter with a sweet Berber woman while we were taking a break under a tree, waiting for a raincloud to pass.  Had we been like the group of 4 British men that just plowed past us on the trail we would hardly have even noticed the women.  But since we were slow travelers, we ended up spending a good bit of time just talking with her in Darija and exchanging food (and by “exchanging” I really mean the Berber woman forcing apples upon us that we couldn’t refuse, so out of guilt for taking her apples, and because of the infectious mountain generosity that was permeating into us, we offered her the only food we had left: a small bag of almonds).  Then as we were leaving, she tried to invite us over for couscous at her house, but because it was getting dark and we still had a 2 hour hike in front of us to get back to Imlil, we had to decline.

Slow travel also allowed us time to reflect our experience and what we were seeing around us.  For instance, one overarching theme of this weeklong adventure was the strong Berber (or as my professors prefer to say “Amazigh”, which means “free man” in the Berber/Amazigh language) identity we encountered both in the High Atlas Mountains and the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert.  The 1^st taste of this identity appeared during our first night in Imlil when ‘Abdu, some sort of guide we think was working at the CAF Refuge we stayed at (but we’re still not positive), immediately brought us “Berber Whiskey” (i.e. mint tea) right after we had checked in.  This terminology caught me off guard because in the predominantly Arab cities the tea is sometimes called “Moroccan Whiskey,” but never “Berber Whiskey.”  Then the next night after our 8 hour trek to the base of Toubkal, which had just received about a meter of snow the night before, we talked with a few of the Moroccan guides who were leading non-impoverished college student European tourists and never once heard them refer to themselves as Moroccan; instead, they always proudly called themselves Berber but told us that their Islamic identity always came first. 

This hybrid identity was even more pronounced in the desert of eastern Morocco, where there are Arabs, Amazigh, and Bedouins (desert nomads from Arabia), all of which are still Muslims.  The best way to describe these identities in terms of the US is that the Amazigh are like the Native Americans if they had coexisted with the European colonizers (who in this example are like the Arabs) for centuries, had converted to Christianity, and had led several dynastic movements (on second thought this isn’t a great illustration, but that’s because Morocco is like no other country in the world).  So then up until the 1930’s, the Amazigh of the mountains and the desert remained largely autonomous from the central government until the French finished their campaign of “pacification.”  This history of autonomy has given the Amazigh a strong historical identity independent of their Moroccan identity but surprisingly not in conflict with it.

Now with the history/sociology lesson over let’s return to the desert.  The desert trip I and my friends took was the touristiest thing I’ve done in Morocco, but because I went in with this idea in mind, I was able to enjoy the 3 days I spend there.  For instance, the camel ride into the desert was essentially a glorified county fair pony ride during which I sat on a camel while our Bedouin guide, Muhammad, led the caravan of camels to our “Bedouin” campsite.  What’s more, every 5 minutes Muhammad would shout out “Africa!” and “Sahara!” even as we climbed onto the top of a huge jeep to leave on our last day.  But not even the cheesy attempts to give us the “Sahara” experience most tourists demand could ruin the beauty of the desert as we sat on the top of tallest sand dune for miles around, watching the sun set and the shadows of the dunes creep towards the edge of the Algerian border.  36 hours after that sunset my slow travel tour of Morocco came to an end as the train pulled into the Rabat Centrale Ville train station at 6:30 am and I walked home to take a nap after 12 hours of nighttime travel from the desert.

p.s. again, sorry for this back log of blog posts; my post on Eid al-Adha will be posted shortly.