“So we transport … only?” asked a lady sitting subsequent to me in crude though discerning English as we sat in a packaged cell on a steer speeding by Moroccan farmland. We were a solitary unveiled, unparalleled women in a car.
Traveling alone in this North African, Muslim nation where open spaces are roughly exclusively male, we got that doubt everywhere, from a revisit flyer loll in a capital’s airfield to a kitchen of a riad – a normal home with a yard – low in Fez’s medina, a ancient walled territory of a city.
With passionate nuisance and attack creation news from Egypt to India to Brazil, we was keenly wakeful that as a blonde Western tourist, we could not pass unobserved. And observe, glisten and smirk many Moroccan organisation do. A publisher told me his sisters vital in Casablanca were desperately sleepy of being “eye-raped.”
In Jan and June, we spent some-more than 3 weeks exploring Morocco, from a majestic cities to a dried oases, mostly alone, though during times concomitant a organisation of students from a U.S. university where we teach. They were all women though one.
The group, notwithstanding medium dress, literally stopped traffic. Alone, we schooled to resolutely contend “la, shukran” – no, appreciate we – to any invitation or approach, and got to suffer a nation by a woman’s eyes. That meant some pavement-staring to equivocate confrontations, though also astonishing glimpses into this hypnotizing land where a resources of cultures with ancient roots abuts illiteracy and subsistence.
Roman heritage
As my seatmate on a steer and we common concept lady speak about kohl eyeliner and marrying a loves of a lives, this beautician from Casablanca reminded me of a lively women portrayed in a overwhelming Roman mosaics in Volubilis, a few miles (kilometers) north of a steer marks in north-central Morocco.
The scarcely 2,000-year-old city ruins, with a conventional arch and rows of basilica columns surfaced by storks, dawn in pretentious siege amid a rolling landscape of olive trees. As donkeys brimful with harvested greens slave along a dry roads, tiny seems to have changed.
But a colorful building mosaics of inadequately dressed, frolicking gods and goddesses daydream drastically opposite mores. A few hours’ expostulate north by a Rif mountains, on a pebbly Mediterranean beach scarcely in steer of Spain, we alone wore a bikini among women sporting veils and ankle-length tunics.
Imperial cities
The tact equation was unexpected topsy-turvy when we prudishly put on that same bikini for a apart revisit to a hammam – baths – in Fez, a eighth-century collateral of a initial Arab, Islamic dynasty to order Morocco from a same sensuous farmland as Volubilis.
A muscular, sweaty masseuse nonchalantly pulled it off, withdrawal me lonesome usually in olive-based black soap and precariously offset on a marble slab. As she scrubbed hurl after hulk hurl of passed skin cells off me, we overheard a dozen other preening exposed women pity a accessible giggle during a “dirty American,” as one put it.
In Fez, a medina is a enormous beehive of windowless, earth-toned homes and shops congested in a bowl-shaped stream basin. In Marrakech, built by a dynasties that ruled Morocco from a 11th by a 13th century, a medina’s rose-colored walls mount out in a dried opposite a snowy Atlas mountains.
In possibly medina, if we like unconstrained haggling, follow a upsurge of internal women by a obstruction and bucket adult on all from candy to costly leather and steel handicrafts.
If we hatred shopping, as we do, catch a colors and smells while creation a beeline for a many madrasas, or Islamic schools. In a centuries-old Ben Youssef propagandize in Marrakech, little dorm bedrooms face a balmy yard where each in. is a kaleidoscope of perplexing timber carvings, mortar inscriptions, and geometric mosaics.
Most tourists in Marrakech combine on a souks around Djemaa el-Fna, a medina’s executive block bustling with food stalls come dusk. That leaves blissfully forlorn grand 16th-century monuments, like a busted El Badi house of pinkish sandstone and a Saadian tombs, a funeral formidable lonesome in blindingly colorful tiles.
The same goes for another former majestic capital, Meknes, reduction than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Fez. we skipped a medina and wandered by a eerily empty, enormous late 17th-century stately granaries and stables.
Ksars and dunes
To conduct from Marrakech along a legendary former trade track to Timbuktu, we relied on a beam and motorist for a three-day personalized debate of perfect dried magic.
As a heat rose to 118 F (48 C), we wove by ancient fortified adobe villages baked in a salmon-colored hills, dark valleys ripping with date palms, and lulling Saharan dunes. My qualms about sleeping alone in a tent evaporated by a time we reached it on a behind of my camel, led by a Bedouin beam who walked by a moonlit dried with unerring mental GPS, and a functioning iPhone.
Rabat and Casablanca
Most trips to Morocco start or finish in a complicated domestic and business capitals, Rabat and Casablanca, where a suffused sea light and white art-deco districts recall, improbably, a design of South Beach.
In Casa, we acknowledge my prominence was a fake: Rick’s Cafe, that non-stop in 2004 to reconstruct a locality of a 1942 classical film “Casablanca.” Channeling Ingrid Bergman, we requested “As Time Goes By,” though was told it’s usually played during night. Here’s looking during glorious shrimp pasta and olive bread, instead.
In Rabat, a ancestral sites line a Bou Regreg river. Just outward a city core is Chellah, a Roman ruin, once a necropolis and after an Islamic eremite center, and now a singular immature space but ogling hassles.
Walking toward a ocean, we pass a 12th century unprepared Hassan building subsequent to a radiant monolith of a stream king’s grandfather before reaching a white-and-blue Kasbah des Oudayas. High on a precipice over a Atlantic, encircled by Gothic walls and palm trees, it’s a postcard shot of Rabat.
In a partially compact, linear medina, we spent one dusk examination generations of women literally let down their hair – veils private – to prepare couscous and bake almond pastries as a TV soap show blared in a house’s executive courtyard.
In a bustling cafeteria nearby a French colonial Ville Nouvelle neighborhood, we common chocolate pastries, smoothies and Cokes with womanlike Moroccan students operative on a documentary about passionate harassment.
One of them was removing prepared to transport alone – to investigate in China.
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If You Go…
GETTING THERE: Most general flights go to Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakech, that is served by many low-cost carriers.
GETTING AROUND: Trains and “petit taxis” are available and cheap. Desert Majesty – http://www.desertmajesty.com – formed in Ouarzazate, offers tours of dried highlights.
SAFETY: For women roving alone, a few “don’ts”: Don’t use a common “grand taxis”; don’t travel in a medina after shops close; don’t enter cafes with usually men; don’t splash ethanol in public.
STAY: In Fez’s medina, both atmospheric bedrooms and multicourse dinners are curated like museum pieces during Dar Dmana, http://www.riaddardmana.net/. In Rabat, a Mercure Sheherazade – http://www.mercure.com – has a glorious French and Moroccan breakfast spread. In Marrakech, a staff’s use is accessible and unblemished in a tiny and gorgeously flashy Riad Nesma – http://www.riadnesma.com – in a medina as good as during a lushly landscaped, lush Dar Zemora – http://www.darzemora.com/ – outward a city in a Palmeraie.
from Around The World http://aroundthe-world.info/experiencing-morocco-as-a-woman-traveling-alone-2/
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