We left Essaouira on a sunny afternoon – after leaving the Mediterranean coast, I don’t think we saw a single cloud in Morocco – and embarked on the three-hour drive to Marrakesh. On the outskirts of the town, where the buildings thinned out but people were still everywhere, we saw a young Moroccan dude standing by the roadside, waving his index finger at oncoming cars. Hitchwiki‘s page on Morocco had prepared me for this – Moroccans hitchhike using their index finger instead of their thumbs. We made the decision in seconds, and Andrew pulled over to pick the hitchhiker up.

His name was Faical. He was a college-age dude from Marrakesh who spoke passable enough English to explain that he had casually hitched to Essaouira for the weekend and was heading back home. We happily took him in, and for the next three hours we had a friendly Moroccan to make conversation with. Faical was as curious about us as we were about him, but the language barrier made progress slow, sometimes painstaking. At times he would seem to understand us perfectly, responding coherently and thoughtfully, but then we’d say something to his utter bewilderment, or he would say something in clear yet nonsensical English, so matter-of-factly that I felt like my grasp of the language must be slipping. But we were all having fun.

We dropped Faical off at his neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Marrakesh, where instead of having suburbs or farmland around it, the city just tapers off into barren desert. This was our first trek away from the ocean, and indeed, Marrakesh seems to make no sense. Apparently a river feeds it, but we never saw the thing, so it just felt totally absurd that such a dense, sprawling city could exist in such a miserably hot place. It was late afternoon when we started nearing the city center, and the heat was sweltering.

We had been warned about Marrakesh. Just as Tangiers was a place to take care, where naive tourists were seen as easy pickings for all kinds of shady entrepreneurs, Casablanca and Marrakesh were popular with tourists and densely packed, notorious for petty crime and bad deals. Marcus, who had lived in Rabat and traveled all around Morocco about seven years ago, had said it was annoying but not particularly unsafe, but I’d also heard my mom’s review of the country – she and my dad traveled in Morocco in the seventies and had to cut their trip short because the begging and hassling were so exhausting to them. And Marrakesh that phenomenon’s infamous epicenter.

As in Essaouira, we had used our AirBnB app to book rooms in cross-promoting hostels, and as in Essaouira, we realized only when all promising roads led to dead ends that our hostel was in the medina and we would have to walk. This time it wasn’t dramatically walled in, but everything was pedestrian only. Andrew was a hero to us all, valiantly maneuvering the Kangoo through frustratingly pedestrian-only roads and roundabouts, but to no avail. Eventually a Moroccan dude on a bike pulled up to us and asked if we needed help. We explained that we were looking for someplace to park so we could walk into the city center. He told us to follow him and immediately pedalled off in the other direction.

Andrew sprang to life. Imagine the theme from Diddy Kong Racing playing as Andrew gunned the engine after this blazing fast cyclist, always disappearing around a corner as we swerved around cars and carts and hapless pedestrians in an exhilarating and utterly pointless display of Andrew’s stunning reflexes, honed by thousands of hours of slack-jawed video gaming as if his whole adolescence was a training ground for this exact moment. Maybe it was. It was really quite impressive how Andrew managed to keep our guide in his sights without killing anyone or destroying any property, even as one block turned into two and we realized this guy was taking us halfway across the city at this breakneck pace. We all took turns trying to persuade Andrew to slow down so as not to cause an international incident, but he could not be dissuaded. Someday he’ll have told every grandchild he knows about the time when he lived out one of those “chase the NPC” video game missions in real life and aced it on his first try. “What were video games?” the cyborg grandchildren will telepath to him. He will smile condescendingly.

It was a bit of a buzzkill when, upon finally pulling into a parking area, our guide demanded money, then frowned at what we gave him and demanded more. If he wanted us to feel indebted to him, he should have done the negotiating beforehand rather than masquerading as a friendly passerby. Maybe that was some super American/western thinking on our part, or maybe we were just standing our ground, but we didn’t like feeling swindled.

Upon exiting the car we immediately felt sweaty and parched; the heat in Marrakesh was on another level entirely from Spain and the Moroccan coast. We followed our maps toward the hostel and found ourselves crossing the big central square, Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was like something out of a story. The square itself was vast and packed with people; you could never see far in front of you through the crowd. So you would slip through in your general direction of travel until something distracted you.

There were a lot of the usual Moroccan diversions we’d seen elsewhere – juice bars, restaurants with pushy hosts, vendors of crafts of all types – and a whole menagerie of spectacles we had not yet seen. There was music everywhere, from Berber stuff like we’d heard in Essaouira to all sorts of African drumlines to snake charmers playing their reedy flutes. Entrepreneurs showed off their chained monkeys for tourists; I felt a bit guilty even acknowledging them, knowing that the only reason I hadn’t seen something like this before was that my culture has made up its mind that that stuff is unethical (with the exception of circuses). The big takeaway was that Marrakesh isn’t just the big Moroccan city. We’d seen those. This was something else. Marrakesh is a North African capital, a cultural hub, a place where everything interesting or marketable from the whole region comes together to shake its feathers for the tourists. That’s why, even though Marrakesh is hot and loud and intense and a little more dangerous, I still remember it fondly. A traveller really gets a lot of spectacle for their buck. The best of North Africa is there on full, raucous display.

We were almost through the thick of the crowd when we thought we saw a pair of preteen boys fistfighting with a crowd around them. We didn’t stay to watch, but we all exchanged incredulous looks. Jemma el-Fnaa was another world.

We turned onto a busy market street, then onto a slightly less busy market street, then into a deserted alley, where our hostel was supposed to be. We had somehow found two conflicting names and part of an address, but none of it was helpful, as only half the doors on the alley had numbers or words at all, and none of them had the number or name we were looking for. We doubled back, then tripled back, growing more and more concerned, splitting up into pairs and quadrupling back. But eventually someone must have knocked on an unmarked door and gotten lucky, because soon our host was ushering us into the hostel.

It was a really cool place. There was an open-air square in the center of the building, with a first-floor lounge, a couple floors of balconies and rooms, and a rooftop terrace with comfy furniture and a little kitchen. The rooms were clean and cheap, at somewhere between 10 and 20 euros per guest. Our host, a young, hip-looking Moroccan named H’Mmad who seemed to live there, explained that he was just starting the enterprise, and he was doing everything he could just get the word out about it. He was a generous host, giving us maps and tea (it’s a Moroccan thing to pour the tea from as high up as possible) and talking with us awhile on the rooftop, which had a serious Agrabah vibe.



Faical had offered to show us around in the evening, so after a quick rest we headed back into the square to meet him. On the way we stopped to take a closer look at the boyfighting ring. It was exactly what we’d feared. I don’t want to assume those two boys boxing without gloves were helpless victims – maybe the whole thing could be viewed as an admirable display of capitalist entrepreneurship – but I know these things can get dark, so I assumed the worst. Madison takes good pictures, and he seized his opportunity, sneaking his camera up surreptitiously for a quick shot of the spectacle. He wasn’t sneaky enough. The older boy who passes the hat and collects the tips (bets?) for the fighting ring was on him in a second, not letting him leave without paying for the picture he took. He reluctantly coughed up a few dirham, and we walked on in the sobering reality that we’d just financially contributed to the boyfighting ring.

We met Faical by the police station on the side of the square. The first place he took us was a little street sandwich place where you can get what amounts to a Moroccan sloppy Joe (delicious) for barely $1 USD. We felt like kings. Without a clear agenda for our exploits, we let Faical take us wherever he thought was cool. We ended up south of the square in the Kasbah area after a longer-than-expected walk – the language barrier with Faical was still difficult – drinking delicious smoothies and listening to Bob Marley while Faical told us about his life as a nursing student. The area was cool. Alcohol isn’t impossible to find in Morocco, but it’s definitely not ubiquitous, and nightlife is very different when alcohol isn’t at the center of it. People still go out to smoke and dance to music and eat, and the clubs we walked by had all that, but the feeling was different. Andrew was a lot more curious about them than the rest of us, and in retrospect I wish I’d overcome my travel fatigue a little more and latched onto his nighttime enthusiasm. We headed back to our hostel before Faical was quite done with his night, thoroughly worn out after exploring both Essaouira and Marrakesh in one day.

Our host cooked us breakfast for a few extra dirham, and it was delicious and copious. We shot the breeze with him and his friend before heading out to meet Faical one last time on our way out of town. He had offered to take us to a hammam, a kind of traditional Moroccan bathhouse. We didn’t really know what to expect, but it was a chance to do a particularly Moroccan thing with a true Moroccan, so we were all in. It took us half the morning to decipher Faical’s cryptic texts and figure out where he was trying to meet us, so we were a little frustrated when we finally met up – we had to drive back to Tangiers that afternoon to get me and Madison back to Spain the next morning.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I’m not sure how what we experienced differs from whatever extravagant hammam tourists without local hitchhiking guides end up at. It was dirt cheap, for one thing, out on the edge of the city, with only the most local dudes inside. Here’s the concept, to the best of my knowledge: Morocco is hot. Bathing in cool water is somehow not the obvious solution to the problem of the heat. Instead, you walk into a tiled, skylit sauna where the floor itself sears your little baby feet, and fill up several buckets with absolutely scalding water. Then you have a seat on the floor and dump that water all over yourself. There are some nice spa elements, as you use little pads to exfoliate your whole body (Faical had said we should wear nothing, but everyone was in their swim shorts, to our chaste Western relief. I guess that’s what he meant). Then we rinsed off and repeated. There was a little soapy stage, and at one point we each let Faical twist us around on the ground and yank on our limbs and give us a brief little back massage with his feet – a vulnerable and strangely squishy experience that made perfect sense in the context of what was going on.

We kept expecting the next step to be the cool-water rinse-down phase, as we were sweating like dogs and not really feeling clean or refreshed at all, but it never came. At the end, you just dry off and put your clothes on. I guess the idea is that, like a rough massage/limb-popping, the relief comes from the fact that when you leave the hammam, you aren’t suffering anymore. The heat outside is the refreshing cool stage. I’m not sure any of us would be enthused to do it again, but it kind of made sense, in a bizarre way.

Madison had to catch a flight out of Madrid, and I was going to meet Jane in Valencia for a couple weeks of romping around Spain and Italy together, so that hammam was really the last hurrah for the two of us. Andrew would take us all back to Tangiers and drop off the Kangoo, and then he and Drew would spend a few more days exploring the country by other means before ferrying back to Europe themselves. We blitzed through a Moroccan grocery store to restock on snacks and water. I wanted a plum, so I tried to buy one, but the cashier wouldn’t ring it up and just gave it back to me. I guess he was giving it to me for free. I took it and he didn’t stop me, so he must have been. But I have no idea why. Ever cryptic with his passable but not fluent English, Faical’s only explanation was, “You’re not in America anymore.”

The drive back to Tangiers was hot and long and tolerable. We listened to music out of the one hissily working speaker and played our usual word games to pass the time. Our AirBnB in Tangier was truly the worst, mixing problems we’d seen in other Moroccan AirBnBs (unreachable host, eventually being let in by some acquaintance of the host, a severe lack of toilet paper) with new problems (no wifi, a terribly moldy bathroom), and our dinner was just the wrong balance of price and quality – high and low, respectively. Andrew, bedraggled from days of driving, went off on his own personal odyssey to find alcohol while we ate. He came back as we were finishing, even more haggard and disappointed than before. No luck. Madison and I said goodbye to Drew and Andrew the next morning and rode the ferry in tired silence, watching Africa disappear into the misty horizon.