Cycling Morocco – more observations

Now that we’ve been away from Morocco for a week and already raved a lot (too much?) about how great the riding was there, I thought I’d reflect a bit on a few of the many other aspects of Morocco. 

1.  The People 

Before going to Morocco the thing we heard most from folks who had visited there was “the people are sooo nice!” So we had high expectations of very nice folks.  And indeed, we found Moroccans to be super nice, friendly people; we got more waves, cheery “bonjours”! and supportive beeps from people in cars – and trucks, and vans – than anywhere.  Virtually everyone waved at us.  To be sure, when you’re on small roads or in mountains – both of which we were on most of the time – in most countries people tend to wave (I usually wave back and say “hello fellow road user!” since that’s what we have in common) but in Morocco it’s even more so.  That said, we didn’t get a lot of folks insisting that we come into their homes and join them for tea, which we heard was a common occurrence; usually we find that as cyclists we are more approachable than typical car or bus-borne tourists and thus get to meet more folks, but that didn’t happen to us.  

That said, we stayed in guest houses or modest hotels every night, and the propietors were all soooo nice! 

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And as soon as we’d check in they’d ask us if we wanted tea, and at the end of a a long day in the saddle a pot of mint tea laden with sugar always sounded great, especially when it came – as it usually did – with salty peanuts and little cookies, both of which were also great end-o-day snacks.  To be sure, Moroccans first language is Arabic and their second is French, and we have neither, so chatting with us wasn’t very appealing to anybody

Like some developing countries we’ve been to, there were always people along the roads walking, working, whatever, and so many of them sorta fulfilled these images of either pretty weathered older doods or women in their “kaftans” (robes) and hijabs.  

While images of people are such a great way to understand a culture and get a sense of the life, the Moroccans (Muslims?) were not keen for photos.  I even was bold enough to ask a few times even knowing the answer, and I got stern finger wags and “non!” every time.  So it goes.  But I got a few kinda sneaky snapshots:

We saw so many characters just walking down the roads, many times in what seemed like pretty isolated, long-ways-from-anywhere places.  

Here are some pics of pics in a hotel that are good representations of the many characters we saw:

These guys just randomly checked in to help us out:

Kids were ubiquitous.  Someone mentioned to us that there was a holiday while we were there, and there were schools for sure, but wow there were a lot of kids on the streets.  They did what kids do when they see someone unusual:  yell, run towards/after us, ask for money, pens, or food, “where you from?”, etc.  One common game was chicken; sometimes they’d fan out across the road as we came towards them – usually more fun when we were going down hills – and we’d totally hold our line and they’d have to leap outta the way.  A little scary, but it always worked.  A couple of times they grabbed Ash’s bike (her panniers make for good handles) and she unleashed on them, but that was only a couple of times and overall we were relieved that kids didn’t throw rocks at us the way they like to do in Ethiopia, and we weren’t quite as much of a “show” as we were in Ethiopia either, which was a bit of a relief.    And kids are always good for being in pictures:

2.  Drivers

Even as people are nice and wave, they drive fast and aggressively.  We were often on 1 lane or 1.5 lane wide roads, and they drove pretty fast on those and didn’t really give way much, including loving to drive the apex of corners, which was a bit unnerving.  And they love to tailgate each other, which isn’t a big deal but sometimes the tailgater wouldn’t be able to see us.  But that said, we spent about 90% of our time on very lonely roads so there weren’t many cars:  just the occasional work van thing, Euro tourists, and guys on scooters maybe every 10-15 minutes – sometimes longer!  – so the roads and the riding was stellar.

Food

We had heard that Moroccan food was amazing.  It was…and it wasn’t.  The few times we were in the cities we had great meals:

but – just like in the rural areas of the US and many other countries – Moroccan cuisine is meat and potatoes.  In Morocco it comes in the form of a “tagine”, a clay pot consisting of a bottom tray with a cool lid where meat, potatoes, and a few carrots and a little onion were baked together.  It became a bit of a standard joke:  we’d get to a guest house, confirm we had a room, ask if we could get dinner, and they’d enthusiastically:  “Tagine!”  Then eventually they’d bring it out, set it in front of us, count to three, and then with a flourish lift it off for us to ogle at the pile of meat and potatoes, whereupon we’d kinda feign delight as if it was the first/best meat and potatoes we’d ever had.  Then we’d ask for salt before even trying it!  But it was fine; we ate it a lot and it was always the same and it filled the need for calories and nutrients that we needed.  

The guest houses always supplied breakfast, which usually consisted of their kinda bland flat-ish round loaves of bread, sometimes kinda thick crepe-like fried squares of dough, and some sort of egg, with usually homemade jam and homemade butter, and little foil-wrapped triangles of that packaged cheese that sorta seems like Euro Velveeta, and they were always pretty good with enough for us to make a road-sandwich for later.  

We bumbled into a couple of markets, which like all markets, were pretty fun. 

Dates and figs were mainstay snack items, and there were a bazillion oversized closets that were basically candy bar, chips, and fizzy sugary drink bottle stores where you could at least fuel up, if not very nutritiously.  We were always amazed to see how much meat was hanging out in/around the meat stands in 80 degree temps:

though we ate it all and didn’t get sick, it’s probably not up to USDA standards! 

4.  Communications

Morocco’s cell phone network is better than the US’s in terms of coverage in rural areas; not sure what that says about our respective governments, but it’s true, and for sure like most places cell phones are ubiquitous even in very remote areas.  I would guess that  – along with paving many formerly gravel roads with chip seal – it’s part of a bigger effort to enable rural folks to be more connected.  That said, all the guest houses had wifi, but in many cases it barely or didn’t work, which was fine, though Ashley – as the Chief Navigator for the team with the cool Coros computer – kinda needed wifi to help plan the routes for the next days, but she learned to go bigger when we had good coverage (though when we would change our minds on the route that became somewhat problematic at times.  

5.  Guest houses

As I mentioned earlier, after about 10 days of sweating all day every day and not feeling like camping at all since we were perpetually hot and sun-crusted at night we sent our camping equipment off to Innsbruck, our only for sure longer term place (as of this moment – three weeks later – the package is hung up in Austrian customs…).  So we were exclusively dependent on places to stay. But there are so many folks who are keen to try to get a piece of the 12M annual visitors to Morocco that even planning routes through what felt like really remote areas we were able to always find places to stay, and virtually all of them were at least on The Google if not booking.com.  Not surprisingly, many of them only did cash, which was fine, and they were all really nice with nice tile work, wood work, clean bathrooms, etc.  And it was fun too because as mentioned all the people were so friendly and using a bit of Ash’s decades-old French and a translate app we could at least a tiny bit of conversation, and it was fun to see the inside of their dwellings.  

Some were super nice

Litter

Morocco is a bad place for litter.  There’s plastic water bottles, plastic bags, plastic everything, all over the place.  The only place we wouldn’t see a lotta litter was up pretty high on the mountain passes, maybe because they’d already thrown it all out down in the valleys.  At first it was disconcerting, but though we hated to admit it, over time you just kinda got used to it, for better or worse.  But regardless, it’s a thing, and it’s too bad; we felt that actually having government-sponsored garbage pickups would go a long ways towards making those 12M visitors feel like the country they are spending a lot of money in isn’t a trash pile and maybe the people and their habits would follow?  

7. Cats and dogs

Like litter, traveling in “developing” (I’m a little uncomfortable with that word; seems like a poor euphemism for…..permanently struggling? countries) seeing a lot of vivid examples of abuse/neglect of domestic animals is common and disturbing for us Americans, who spend $145 billion on our pets, and in most cases our pets are worth it!  But that’s not the case in many countries, and scraggly, scared – or scary – dogs and cats are all-too common.  But in Islam – according to the interwebs – cats are considered clean animals and are viewed favorably due to their association with the prophet Muhammad. They are allowed in homes and mosques, and it is considered a virtuous act to show them kindness, as cruelty to animals is a serious sin.”  GOOD.  We read Alice Morrison’s great book “Adventures in Morocco” and she said that cats are basically part of the community with little “ownership” of them, so they just roam, and not only are they all healthy but they are all super mellow, friendly cats who return the good vibes that they seem to get, which is fun.  

Dogs, on the other hand, are not so lucky.  Strangely, dogs are “unclean” in Islam, but because there are so many sheep and goats in rural areas and we spent most of our time in rural areas, the dogs that we saw were in good shape as workers.  There were plenty of pet dogs in yards and we saw none of the roaming packs of feral dogs that we were warned of enough that we spent way too much money getting a couple of rabies shots apiece before we left.  However….it’s possible that the lack of packs of feral dogs may be the result of a big effort to cull dogs in Morocco as a function of the soccer World Cup being in Morocco in 2030.  Here’s a somewhat horrifying article about it from earlier this year on CNN and a friend who has spent a lot of time there told us that spaying/neutering dogs is not really a thing there.  But according to the article it seems like there may be some hope for a better way to control dogs in Morocco.  

8. Sites and interesting stuff

Like all places Europe and Middle East – and I suppose North Africa too, thought I don’t know much about the other countries – Morocco has a super long and interesting history with lots of occupations and conquests, with great structures like palaces and walls around the old cities:

nd there were lots of cool ruins, a few fun museums, and some amazing natural features: Dades Gorge, Todra Gorge, Monkey Fingers Canyon, Taghia Gorge, and many others down in the more-deserty part and on the coastline, neither of which we visited.  A mandatory stop on the touristo travel itinerary is heading for the Sahara desert, where you get on a camel and do a 3 or 4 day jaunt out into the classic rolling dunes of the Sahara.  I’ve said many times how much I love The Desert in reference to southern Utah/northern Arizona, SoCal, etc. but on this trip I realized that I don’t necessarily like the desert for desert’s sake, I like to do the things that we do in the desert, like ride, hike, canyoneer, etc.  So a tromp into a sea of sand on the back of a camel – after we’d already been taking in an unusual October heat wave – wasn’t very appealing, so we skipped the classic desert trip.  But people love it!  We also skipped a huge chunk of the southern part of the Southern tier of the Route of the Caravans, kinda for the same reasons but also because due to the ongoing drought there were reports of epic sand “riding” (pushing) and we weren’t keen for that, so we veered back into the mountains, which  we found was great.  

Overall we really liked our Moroccan adventure; it was as fun and interesting as we had hoped it would be, even if we did cut it a bit shorter than we anticipated (from 6 weeks down to 4) but we felt like we had done all that we had intended to do, had a great time, and were keen to get to Sicily to try that country on, which has also been fabulous (and a bit easier; more roads, less mountainous, more guest houses, and…not only is it Italian food, it’s Sicilian food!  We’d highly recommend anyone who is Morocco-curious to give it a go, and do it on bikes!