The Mesmerizing Beauty of Morocco

Remote Year talks frequently about living outside of your comfort zone. As remotes, we throw around a lot of words (and hashtags) about #newnormal and #level3fun, all describing the swift transformation of our lives when we packed up a bag or two to travel the world for a year.

So far, Yugen has only called Europe our home, and while there have been some difficulties along the way, primarily, living in Croatia, Czech Republic and Portugal has been somewhat like our old hometowns. I’ve definitely been uncomfortable at times, bordering on the line of familiar and unfamiliar, but it wasn’t until this past week in Morocco that I really understood – and lived – the term.

There are so many moments I’d like to capsulate into my memory, all of which I scribbled haphazardly in the notes section of my dying iPhone on the second 10+ hour journey in the desert, trying to ensure I didn’t forget any of the wonder. And while I’d like to describe it, considering words are my bread-and-butter, explaining Marrakesh and the Zagora desert has me lost for sentences to string together.

In short, there is so much beauty in this tiny sliver of the globe, and being there was an abrupt and intense realization of how the majority of the world lives, making me acutely aware of my own Western privilege. But it was also a lesson in happiness and how that definition is digested in divergent cultures and communities, many of which, still struggle with access to running water in what’s considered an emerging destination.

Like visiting the UNESCO world heritage site of Aït Ben Haddou, which is rich with a centuries-old history, a place where Jewish and Muslim religion once lived amongst each other, and now, a town with it’s own dialect and built atop a hill with homes made of straw and mud. Here, a few families still live, their prayer room the grandest of all their rooms, more important than even having a sheet in their bedroom.

It was also a crash course in the humanity I’m humbled to explore more as I continue this trek through Asia and South America, where languages don’t always blend and phrases aren’t always needed, but gestures can be translated effortlessly. Like, having the opportunity to eat dinner in the home of a local family for an assignment, complete with their twin children and their newly-brought-inside cat. As French, Arabic, English and Berber rattle through the basement-level home, and mint, jasmine, orange and sage fragrance the air, the grandmother – or jida (pronounced like lala) – cooks for the family and their guests. She doesn’t even know her age, for lack of a birth certificate, but she takes your hands to make the traditional Moroccan bread, Batbout, encouraging you to knead deeper and smiling when you’re able to roll.

And it taught me about what I hope for this year, and perhaps, maybe what I’ve been forgetting in the mad dash to yet another hashtag – #30before30 – checking countries off my passport stamp list.

It’s going to go by so fast – in fact, after this month, I’ll be 1/4 of the way through. And well, I don’t want to rush these experiences merely to say I had them.

While visiting a monument and riding a camel are stories I can tell, the ones I want to share are from the laughter around a campfire with new friends and new strangers, who shared a rather-smelly bus trip with you and still want to get to know you. And friends who bring you seltzer water and crackers when African cuisine gets the best of your stomach.

Or the quiet, serene beauty of watching the full moon from atop a sand dune, talking about North Carolina and Tennessee, reminding one another that our families will see the same moon in just a few hours, sitting in awe of the way we’re all connected. Or watching the sunrise over a small piece of the Sahara, wondering how I became so lucky to see it’s splendor.

Thank you Africa for pushing me far beyond that elusive comfort zone and reconnecting me, sans WiFi, to my reasons for choosing Remote Year. I can’t wait to see more of your country, one of these days, when I have the time to explore your lands and give them the attention they most certainly deserve.

Here, a few of the photos I’ll forever treasure, and a quote that perhaps sums it up better than I ever could:

“But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses,” -Bill Bryson, author