True stories,
• Surrounded by a gang of knife-wielding pre-teens
• Trapped 2-days in the Sahara in need of a hospital
• Cornered by a militant hashish dealer who said I didn't pay
Traveling builds character (if it doesn't kill you first):
🔸
Ancient society made leather in large vats of bird poop.
Our tour guides gave us clusters of mint to hold as gas masks.
They left their smiles in the leatherworks when they showed us out the back.
Told us to 10x their fee. Thugs blocked the alley back to town.
So we ran.
5 times a day the prayer call goes. "Allāhu ʾakbar," blasted over loud speakers.
Shop keepers pull down their metal shudders and lock up as they go to mosque for obligatory prayer.
In not long, they return like nothing happened.
"Are you looking for La Grande Place?" The kid spoke English and was maybe 11.
We still hadn't found our way back from the leatherworks.
This is ~2 years before maps apps.
"Yes, we are."
He led to us to an empty street of shuttered shops.
"Prayer," he reminded us.
For a city packed with people, this street was strangely empty.
Suddenly, more kids surged out from hiding,
A gang of pre-teens with knives from the shadows.
We were 3/4ths surrounded.
I'd never shouted, "Run!" and actually meant it before. (Much less twice in a day.)
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Our taxi dodged a tipped-over manure cart in the intersection.
We darted up a one-way ramp to make up the lost time.
The donkey was still hooked up to the cart. Dangling in the air.
I felt safer than the donkey.
The lawless roads seemed to breed competence.
We stopped for cold drinks at a place that turned out to be our driver's cousin's carpet shop.
Poor in America.
But in Morocco, I was rich.
We couldn't carry carpets, but they tried to sell them to us anyhow.
Just me and my best friend in life, Pippa. Our backpacks were stashed.
Pippa had traveled to every continent except Africa and the poles.
Me? I'd been to the Grand Canyon.
"Let's start in Spain — see where it takes us," she'd said.
"It" took us to the ferry to Tangiers.
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Muhammad ran the cafe on the roof of our hotel in Marrakesh.
He was our age, and we became fast friends.
Well, he and Pippa became friends.
I got up early and wrote stories in my notebooks at a table in his cafe.
Muhammad invited us to taxi to his village and meet his family.
He had a trip planned and wanted to show us what real Moroccan life was like.
If the police stopped us, we'd say we weren't together.
Scams are so common, it's a major crime to associate with foreigners.
Muhammad's family only spoke Arabic. We spoke English, French, and Spanish. Their 11 chickens clucked.
His mother made couscous for dinner. We sat at a long table with the extended family. All smiles, and gestures.
Celebrated guests.
There were 10 chickens when we left.
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You've never felt so free as when
you've only got a backpack with 3 changes of clothes.
You've never felt so lonely as when
you haven't been near anything familiar in months.
After weeks on the road, I wanted to quit and go home.
I couldn't disappoint Pippa, so I stayed
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Continuing on...
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Years ago, Pippa and I had dated. Just for a few months.
We adored each other but weren't a fit. So we became pub buddies instead.
For some 20s coeds traveling the world, sharing rooms and everything else,
it was good that we knew what we were, and what we weren't.
I was hot for a Swiss girl at a hostel. She turned out to be 17.
Pippa met a guy who danced professionally. He turned out 12 years older that 22, but nice.
.
I wasn't sure if I was allowed to talk to Moroccan women, but one talked to me.
Then she introduced me to her pimp.
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In the walking markets, you're expected to negotiate.
If you don't, you look foolish. Foolish makes you a target.
Strike a hard enough bargain though, and they offer you mint tea and ask you to sit and share stories.
If someone's good against you in business, befriend them
Those shopkeepers taught me Arabic greetings, numbers..yes and no.
After that, when hustlers saw my tanned skin and heard me speak, they'd leave me alone.
Actually, usually they'd change.
They'd want to become my buddy and understand why a white boy was learning Arabic at all.
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The taxi driver's cousin sold carpets. HE had a cousin who guided camel trips through the Sahara.
Not interested.
"No, will get you a great deal."
Genuinely no thanks.
"Let me call him and see what he can do."
After an hour, he'd cut the price by 75%. No became why not.
The bustle of overcrowded Moroccan cities had left me overwhelmed.
But camel-riding for hours...through nothing...it centered my soul.
I learned to tie a turban to protect my face from the sun and sand.
Our camels stood taller than horses, their multiple knees like dinosaurs.
In the desert, we survived on well water, but the iodine tablets weren't enough to protect me.
I got horribly sick from something against which I had no defense.
2 days ride from anything.
The guide said my body was resisting. It didn't want to leave the calm of the desert.
I lost all my food, and for two days had only sips of water.
It took all my strength just to stay conscious enough not to fall off the camel.
Delirious. Through seas of dunes, sand, and rocks.
The greatest exercise in mindfulness I've ever attempted.
Somehow I made it.
Pippa was terrified. Did this tiny town have a hospital? No.
When I woke up, she was gone.
The shower drain clogged with sand as I washed that last grains of peacefulness from my skin.
Pippa was back when I came out.
I'd been asleep for 30+ hours. She'd had a day without me.
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"Hashish?" a guy asked me on the beach in Essaouira. He had friendly eyes.
I figured it'd be a quick transaction.
He asked me to follow him.
Smart, I thought. Don't keep your stuff on you.
We walked a quarter-mile. Then he asked me to wait inside a cafe.
The "cafe" was dusty and had no customers, decorations, signage, or food.
I was wearing $150 hiking shoes, had 200 durams in my moneybelt (~$50), and a cheap film camera.
A tall man watched me from the doorway. Never blinked or said a word.
I felt nervous about my shoes.
"Okay, follow me." My guy came back and took me into a catacomb of alleys, mostly underground and devoid of light.
We ended at a dead end.
"Wait here," he said. After he rounded the corner, I heard him running fast.
I was sure I was screwed, but my friends were counting on me.
I couldn't leave now. It'd be an insult.
Even as I felt myself freezing up from terror, I didn't want to.
So I started shadowboxing to keep my nerve.
A old woman spied me from a nearby window.
If she was a spotter, I was glad they saw I was a fighter who knew how to throw one
My guy never had the drugs.
He *knew* a guy who had them.
The real dealer looked like the main villain from a movie about child soldiers.
He wore a black beret, and smoked his cigarette like he was pissed at it for not pumping nicotine hard enough.
"Salamo Alaykom," I said.
At first he was mad that all I wanted was a bit of hash.
I had disturbed his afternoon. How dare I not want any heroine?
"Smell the hashish!" he finally yelled at me in frustration, shoving a small lump of drugs into my hand.
People fake hash with animal droppings sometimes.
"300 durams," he said.
"I agreed to 200. It's all I have."
"Let me see."
I pulled out my 200 and handed it to him. He quickly pocketed it and then repeated himself. "Let me see the 200."
"I just gave it to you."
"Pay me 200." He didn't care he was lying. "Give me 200."
"I did," I repeated.
I couldn't pay him more even if I wanted to.
And I doubt he'd take my word on the value of my shoes.
I was out of moves. I wanted to cower, but there, they respect toughness.
"Give me 200."
"You have it," I said. "Shukran."
I turned and started walking past his guys.
I figured if they moved on me, I'd hear their feet in the dirt and I could take off sprinting.
I'd have a head start of a couple of paces at least.
But it was quiet behind me.
I never looked back the whole way.
And somehow I reached my hostel, and eventually America without dying.
I returned from that trip exhausted, but confident.
Confident that I could accomplish anything.
Confident that I'd never be that lonely again.
Confident nothing would ever be scarier.
...I could do anything.
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There were good times in Morocco too. Plenty of them.
But the truth is, they weren't as important to me.
Because it was navigating all that uncertainty that taught me how capable I was.
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And that's why you should travel. To test yourself. To learn who you can become.
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