Chronologically inappropriate conclusion

The trip is over.  I’m back home (sorry to spoil the ending).  I failed spectacularly at posting often, and for this I am not afraid to blame circumstances.  So for those of you who were confused or disappointed, I apologize.

I’ve updated the first post with relevant pictures.  I wrote another long post covering the middle part of the week, but stopped short of finishing Thursday and forgot a significant event from Wednesday.  I will cover all that in my next post, for those of you with lots of time on your hands and very little else to do with it.  There will be pictures for the skimmers.  In the mean time, a chronologically inappropriate conclusion follows.

I will not be taking an organized group trip again.  The organizers did a good job considering the number of people involved but in order to achieve what they did some sacrifices had to be made to the quality of the trip.  Unfortunately the quality was reduced beyond my personal threshold.  I had a good time and I’m glad I went, for sure.  It just wasn’t for me.

I’ve long been of the sentiment that there are tourists and there are travelers.  I like to consider myself one of the latter (but who doesn’t associate themselves with the more favorable side when making a comparison of light and dark?).  There were times early in the trip when the group would approach something photogenic and the sound of 40 or 50 cameras being whipped out and uncapped would drown out the surrounding noise and probably some small aircraft.  Someone would inevitably squeal “I feel like such a tourist!” to which someone else would giggle “Well, you are!”

Meanwhile, I cringed.  I kept trying to convince myself that yes, I was a tourist too, and it was okay to take that picture.  I kept telling myself that if I was there alone and not in a huge group I would take the same picture and not think twice.  A good photo opportunity is a good photo opportunity, and that’s all there is to it.  But I couldn’t swallow that.

In experimental research, the Hawthorne Effect is a phenomenon in which participants in an activity improve their behavior when they know that they are being merely observed.  In traveling, the newly minted Robinson Effect is a phenomenon in which locals of a country being visited alter their behavior or show other evidence of being disturbed when merely observed by visitors.  The postulate to the Robinson Effect is that the measure of disturbance is in proportion to the number and conspicuousness of the visitors.

Applying the Robinson Effect here, a reasonable conclusion is reached that a small, unlucky subset of the population of Morocco has recently been moderately disturbed.  I don’t like having been a part of that moderate disturbance.  If I need to disturb anyone at all, I like it to be minimal. 

(One could argue here that a perfectly good way to travel is to actively engage the locals and that interaction is even more of a disturbance than simply snapping a photo.  I head off that argument by distinguishing the meaning of “disturbance” as something negative or unwanted, not merely affecting inertia as in disturbing a plant.  I could not agree more that interacting with locals is the most enriching part of any trip, both for the traveler and the local, therefore that encounter is not a disturbance in the sense that I am using it.)

(Please don’t argue that moving a plant is disturbing it in the negative sense and that the plant doesn’t “want” it.  I don’t feel like fighting that fight, and frankly no one should have to.)

“Leave only footprints” is the slogan of conscientious campers and nature enthusiasts everywhere.  It means that visitors to the wilderness should not leave trash behind when they leave or negatively affect the environment while they’re there.  The same thing should apply to traveling but I think that normally that is not the case, and that’s too bad.

As some of you know, this trip marked my first to Africa since we moved from Côte d’Ivoire to Virginia in 1997.  Since 1997 I have been asked more than a few times where my favorite place to live has been or what it was like to live in Africa.  Part of my answer to both of those and to many other questions has always been that Africans are the nicest people.  I repeated that so many times that as I was preparing for Morocco I wondered if my perception would change now that I am nearly 13 years older.

It didn’t change.  The only thing that changed is that my resolve to find a career that takes me to Africa, either on frequent travel or to live, has strengthened.

Experiencing the culture, even as disappointingly sparingly as we did, was a breath of fresh air.  After we visited a spice shop in the medina in Fes, I was sitting outside in the alley with some others from the group and a couple guides hired for the day whose job it was to make sure no one got lost in the maze that is the medina, waiting for some people inside to finish buying their spices and whatnot.  My stomach was rumbling so I took out a bag of trail mix that I had brought from home.  I had a couple bites and saw the guides watching me.  I offered some to them, and they refused.  I had a couple bites, intentionally taking my time.  No reaction except watching, so I put it away.  Finally one of them asked me if it was Americain.  I said oui.  He asked qu’est-ce que c’est.  I told him dried fruit and nuts and asked again if he wanted some.  He said non.  The other one asked if he could have some for his son.  I said sure and put half of it into a second bag.  The first guy was encouraged by this and said, what about him? I gave him the rest.  They noticed that one of them ended up with more than the other, so they evened out the amounts.  One of the employees of the spice shop appeared in the doorway and asked one of the guys if she could have some, and he obliged.  They both thanked me repeatedly and were obviously very happy.

At the Berber tea ceremony, I mentioned that we were fed some homemade food and that Fatima and I made the rounds eating the leftovers.  When we were on the last plate she had some tea left and I had finished mine.  She poured half her tea into my glass and I split my last piece of bread with her. 

The Berber matriarch, who has very little, gave me a token of her appreciation.  At the lunch with the lamb brains, the guides gave half of their extra portion to me and Fatima because they thought we’d want it.  One day on the bus Fatima came on the bus holding a paper cup.  I asked her if it was coffee, and she said yes, then gave me what was left of it.  At one of the rest stops I wandered behind the bus to take pictures of some cactus because there was nothing else to take a picture of.  One of the coolies walked over and struggled with me through a challenging conversation of a little broken French and lots of hand signals, because he didn’t speak English at all nor French very well, and I don’t speak Arabic.  It took us ten minutes of gesturing for him to achieve his goal: to tell me that they eat cactus, and to show me which part they eat.  He was very proud when I finally got it.

I’m not sure if these examples make the points I want them to, but they’re supposed to exhibit sharing, appreciation for small things, and a sense of community that I see too infrequently here at home.  It sounds really self-important and self-serving, but – at the risk of that – there is a fair chance that the totality of what I’m trying to describe is hard to imagine unless you have experienced it.

In any case, it was therapy.

Now I’ll go back to do the last day and a half.  Then will come random stories and tons of pictures and maybe even eventually video.  This email will be the last time I bother you so if you care to keep up, just keep checking the blog.

Thanks for reading.