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restaurant where you eat clichéd food while a belly dancer performs, you visit a carpet
shop. Guides and their tour companies must make a healthy commission. Why else would
they offer the round-trip ferry ride with the tour for the same price as the round-trip ferry
ride without the tour?
In Morocco, package tourists dine with clichés and each other.
Being here without a big tour group, I met gracious Moroccans eager to talk and
share. About the only time I saw other Westerners was when I crossed paths with one of
the many day-tripping groups. As they completed their visit, these tourists walked in a
tight, single-file formation, holding their purses and day bags nervously to their bellies
like paranoid kangaroos as they bundled past one last spanking line of street merchants
and made it safely back onto the ferry.
I pondered this scene, wondering if these tourists—scared, oblivious, clutching the
goodies they traveled so far to pick up on the cheap, and then sailing home without learn-
ing a thing—were dealing with Morocco this way because it's the same way their home
countries deal with the developing world in general.
It was poignant for me because, until the lessons I learned from this trip, I was part
of the problem—recommending the tour rather than the independent adventure. Some of
