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Tag Archives: tour guide

A tour of Fes, Morocco

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by seejanesblog in Morocco

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Tags

calm place, fes, handicraft center, medina, Morocco, souk, souq, tour guid, tour guide

It’s always good to hire a tour guide. Two main reasons I can think of now. 1. He can show you details about a place you might’ve otherwise missed, and 2. He keeps people from driving you crazy in the souq. My guide was Aziz. And a very sweet man at that. We picked him up at a cafe and he presented wearing a sports jacket, nice polo shirt, and slacks. Spiffy. I liked him instantly. And he didn’t skip a beat. Immediately upon being sat in the car he began describing to me Fes and how it has the largest medina in the whole of Africa. And how it is more tranquil than Marrakech. But I already knew that part! What a laid-back, calm place this is. So different from the hustle of Marrakech.

Of course there’s the requisite visit to the handicraft center to see the pottery being made from start to finish, and then being sat in front of a book of mosaic examples to choose the perfect piece to be made specifically for you and then shipped home. For $1200 for a table about 15″ diameter. But other than that, it’s a wonderful experience to see Fes with a guide.

Souq - Fes, Morocco

Flour and grains

Head scarves

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Tannery

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A green-eyed, blonde-haired tourist

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by seejanesblog in Morocco

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

birka, blond hair, blonde, chefchouan, green eyed, Morocco, police security, rif mountains, security checkpoints, tour guide, tourism, tourist, travel

Tourism is king here in Morocco. Or queen. Either way, seems I’m the get out of jail free card when passing through police security checkpoints. But I’m also the flag that sometimes gets us stopped. For instance, when stopped for a requisite hash check in the Rif Mountains, we were waved through. (Presumably I can transport hash, no problem?) But when driving to Chefchouan in the Rif Mountains, we were stopped to confirm that the car is actually authorized as a tourism car. I’m the flag that alerted them to check for that. The green-eyed, blonde-haired tourist. The obvious non-Muslim. So if Mokhtar is walking with me through a village, he is stopped and asked if he has a tour guide license to take me.* It’s often discretely and I don’t even know about it, but it happens. We are always being watched. He doesn’t have a tour guide license so it can sometimes be a problem. “Can’t you just tell them we’re friends traveling together?” I ask naively. “No. We’re not married. Only married men and women travel together. Not friends,” is the answer he gives. Wow. This is amazing to me! So while we can walk together sometimes, especially in a larger city, it still poses a problem because I’m obviously non-Muslim. The tourist. Always trying to find a solution, I suggest I wear a hijab. But I’m told it won’t work. They’ll still know. That’s exactly what I was told in Turkey when I suggested I wear a birka through the markets. “It won’t do any good,” they told me, “We still know.”

*Tour guides are a protected resource in Morocco. The licenses protect their livelihoods and the tourists from scammers posing as guides. So it’s really a good thing it’s followed so closely. But frustrating when you’re just two friends trying to explore Morocco together, especially when one is actually Moroccan!

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