Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Before this visit, I had recommended to my guidebook readers that
day-trippers from Spain just hold their nose and take the organized tour
(with all the big bus groups from Spain's Costa del Sol). A Tangier guide meets
you at the ferry. He takes you on a bus tour of the city and a walk through
the old town, where he leads you to a few staged photo ops (camel ride, snake
charmer, Atlas Mountains tribal musicians). After visiting a clichéd 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 of er the round-
trip ferry ride with
the tour for the same
price as the round-
trip ferry ride with-
out the tour?
Being here
without a big tour
group, I met gra-
cious 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-i le 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 learning a thing—were dealing with Morocco this
way because it's the same way their home countries deal with the develop-
ing 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 those needlessly paranoid tourists likely
In Morocco, package tourists dine with clichés and
each other.
