It is now 6:09 AM and I am wide awake in a hotel room in Marrakech, Morocco. About 48 hours ago I left my house in Oakland to fly to Morocco to start a 10 day tour with Intrepid Travel based on recommendations from the group that I had my Andorra adventure with. I am lying here in this bed writing because I feel compelled to remember the experiences of the last 48 hours and in particular the experience I had last night. Not because it was so earth shattering but just out of some sense that among my experiences I really want to remember this one. It would be easy to overblow those adventures but also I feel like they represent something important. The flight itself was perhaps uneventful if long. Leaving Oakland was easy in an Uber and I went to this second-rate lounge at SFO in the International area that I can get access to with my Amex, where I chatted with a woman headed to Korea and ate mediocre meatballs. The first thing of note was that while still in Oakland I had felt a slight…twinge in one of my teeth on the upper left. But there really wasn’t any easy way to do anything about it at the time so I was just hoping for the best; but as I flew I could feel it getting worse and giving me a slight headache. I kept thinking that my anxiety and hypochondria (which have been getting the better of me lately) were kicking in and tried to sleep and ignore it, which I failed at completely. The flight landed late at CDG, and I already had a short connection so I ended up having to run madly through CDG. Huge shout-out to the staff at CDG who ushered me right to the front of the security line and got me to the gate on time. They were one of the first “trail angels” for me of the trip. Being conversational in French - even if poeple could one hundred percent tell I was American - helped a ton. And then of course we just sat on the plane in Paris for forever, I don’t even know why. Hurry up and wait! I ended up next to a young couple with two young infants who spoke French and overhearing their conversation was cute.
Upon landing in Marrakech I actually managed to get an Uber to the hotel, which apparently is rare. I got there, checked in, and realized with a sinking feeling that my tooth was just getting worse and worse. I suddenly realized that I was headed out for 10 days into the literal countryside and Sahara desert of Morocco and I might have a serious dental problem. I had flashbacks to many years ago when I ignored a bad tooth and then suddenly was in blinding pain and I started to panic a tiny bit. For some context, I have been really trying to embrace not being so anxious and so I had been telling myself this just was no big deal but suddenly I realized that it might be a big deal, and it was Saturday evening, and I was in Morocco of all places. This started an adventure which would culminate about 3 hours later with me in the chair of a dentist in Marrakech, paying him 800 dirham (about $90) in cash to do an emergency cleaning. The end of the story is that I just had bad gums and a mild infection and I’ll be fine but the whole experience was so illuminating and interesting and honestly really positive.
Marrakech is a world that we have largely left behind in the US; whether that’s a good thing or bad is open to debate. It’s very modern here in many ways of course; smartphones and fast food restaurants and GPS. But they still use very old-fashioned taxis for example; the kind you literally flag down from the side of the street. I had my tour guide with me, Abdul - who is awesome - and he started trying to flag down cabs that actually already had riders, and finally we got one. They spoke in Arabic, a long conversation, and I got in. On the way to the dentist we dropped off the first guy that was in the cab, then picked up a woman, then dropped her off, all in about 15 minutes. Abdul ended up connecting on WhatsApp with both of them and the cab driver. There was no music on the radio; there was no need, the conversation was constant. My Uber driver alone took at least 10 phone calls in the 20 mninutes it took me to get to the hotel. Sometimes when I interact with people from this part of the world in Oakland they are this way and it was really interesting to see them in their “native habitat”, so to speak. In some ways I’m jealous.
But to take a step back, unbelievably, there was a dentist who ran a 24/7 emergency service - seemingly mostly for tourists - about 20 minutes from the hotel. I found it on Google, then the hotel called, then Abdul called, then I called. It was very confusing but I came to understand that the dentist didn’t stay at his office; he stayed at home and waited for people to call, then he would go in and open up for them. He was, in a word, awesome. Clean, professional, and fast. You remember how I posted about JSX and the difference between flying them and flying regular TSA? This was like that. It was just him and a dentist chair and his stuff. No insurance, no forms, no nothing: I walked in, he sat me down, he took 3 xrays and showed them to me right there (not leaving the room or anything by the way), then shot me up with novocaine and cleaned the heck out of that tooth and the two next to it and told me I had to get a deep cleaning ASAP when I got home. He wrote me a presecription for pain pills, told me to buy mouthwash, floss and tiny brushes and refused to take any extra money when I tried to give him a tip. The whole thing cost less than $100. Once again proof that our healthcare system is a mess.
One of the great things about travelling is being exposed to other ways of doing things. I think there was a time in America when things worked like this; before Uber and the pandemic and online video games. I’m not saying it’s better, I’m not saying it’s worse - but it is, clearly, different, and it would make sense to imagine that there are both positives and negatives for us as a society. Certainly it’s more confusing for an outsider, and the potential for things like petty scams seems high. But on the other hand it felt all along the way like a very humanistic experience; an experience designed by people for people and it met the needs of me, a person. I honestly have no idea if 24/7 emergency dental care is available in Oakland - maybe it is. After all, I can now book an appointment on my phone for my doctor and often go the same day, so it’s not like we don’t have these conveniences. But this felt very different in a way that’s hard to put my finger on. I think I will always remember walking the streets with Abdul and dodging scooters, or staring out the window of my cab as he had a solid belly laugh with an old Arabic man driving our cab about which I have no clue, or trying to find an open pharmacy because nobody knows when anything is open. The woman that got in or cab on the side of the street, and then later out of our cabon the side of the street, wearing a head scarf and smiling the whole time and paying about $1 for her whole ride. Who knows where she was going or where she was coming from. It’s like the difference between Jacksonville and Oakland, then take that and that’s the difference between Oakland and Marrakech, if that makes any sense.
Marrakech is interesting. The weather here right now is amazing, and there’s more green than I would think. All the buildings are pink and the city feels very, very alive. I actually witnessed a spontaneous 5-person soccer game break out on the street between some guuys working. It felt like I was in a Sondheim musical but it was real. I also expected more people to be smoking but nobody does that I can see. And I was in a hurry so I ate at - I shit you not - a placed called “O’Mexico” which sold me a spicy set of chicken tenders and french fries wrapped in a tortilla and grilled (for the equiavlent of $6 including a bottle of water I might add) and honestly it was pretty damn good. It is a little janky but surprisingly clean and friendly and honestly in a weird way reminded me of Oakland. I feel bad that I won’t have more time to explore Marrakech but this is a nature tour so we are heading out early this morning and won’t come back until the very end.
But in some ways I feel I already had the peak Morocco experience.
