Ines Discovered Why Slow Travel Changes Everything in Morocco
I met Ines at a dinner party where someone mentioned Morocco and the conversation immediately tilted in her direction. She had been going back for years, always slowing down, always staying longer than she initially planned. When I asked her to explain why that changed the way she saw the country, she said it was less about the country and more about what happens when you stop treating travel like a race.
The first time Ines went to Morocco she did it in ten days and covered five cities. Marrakech, Fes, Chefchaouen, Casablanca, Essaouira. She saw a great deal and understood almost nothing. She came home with photographs and a sense of having been somewhere vivid and bewildering and slightly exhausting, and a nagging feeling that she had been skimming the surface of something that required a different approach entirely.
The second time she went back she spent three weeks in two places. A week in a riad in the medina of Fes and two weeks in a small town in the Souss valley that most people drive through without stopping. She came home understanding Morocco in a way that the first trip had not touched. The country had shifted from a backdrop into something three-dimensional and she has been going back on the same terms ever since.
What changes when you slow down
The medina of Fes is the largest car-free urban area in the world and it is also one of the most disorienting places Ines has spent time in. On her first visit she was lost within ten minutes every time she left the riad and found it frightening in a low-level way that never quite went away. By the fourth day of her second visit she was navigating by feel, recognising the particular smell of the tanneries quarter before she could see it, knowing which alley led to the bread oven, knowing which bakery made the best msemen in the morning. The medina did not change. Her relationship to it changed completely.
Slow travel in Morocco specifically means accepting that the country operates on its own rhythms and that most of those rhythms will not match yours on arrival. The pace of conversation, the approach to time, the expectation that tea will be drunk before business is discussed, that a transaction is also a social event and not purely a commercial one. Ines found this frustrating on her first trip and found it one of the best things about Morocco on her second. The difference was having enough time to stop fighting it.
Where to spend more time than you think you need
Fes is the obvious answer for Ines and she will not pretend otherwise. The city is too complex and too layered to be understood quickly and the people who dismiss it after two days are usually the ones who never found their way past the main tourist circuit. Go further in, stay longer, eat where the university students eat, walk the same streets at different times of day. The Fes medina at five in the morning is a completely different city to the Fes medina at noon and both are different again at sunset when the call to prayer comes from seventeen minarets at once.
The Atlas Mountains deserve more than a day trip from Marrakech, which is how most people experience them. Staying in a village in the Ourika Valley or the Ait Benhaddou area for several nights changes the experience entirely. The mountains are not a backdrop to Marrakech, they are a world of their own with their own food and their own pace and Berber communities who have been farming those valleys for longer than most European cities have existed.
Essaouira on the Atlantic coast is the place Ines goes when she needs to decompress. It is windy and white and blue and smells of the sea and grilled fish and the medina is small enough to know well within a day. She has spent a week there doing almost nothing and it was one of the better weeks she has spent anywhere.
The practical side of slowing down
Renting a riad room by the week rather than the night changes the economics significantly and also changes the dynamic with the people running it. By day three you are a guest rather than a customer and that matters in Morocco, where hospitality is not a transaction but a value. Ines has been invited to family meals and given directions that saved her hours and had conversations that she still thinks about, all because she was staying long enough for people to bother with her.
Learn ten words of Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect. Not classical Arabic, Darija. The pronunciation is different and the vocabulary diverges significantly and making the effort to use it, however badly, opens doors that stay closed to people who arrive expecting French or English to cover everything. Ines's Darija is not good. It is good enough to make people laugh and then talk to her, which is all it needs to be.
The Best in Travels,
Your Friend Fushia