From the cities to the Sahara, traditions are being preserved for the future
By Richard Goldberg of New York, New York,
4-time traveler & Overseas Adventurers’ Club member
In the medinas, the old cities, the ageless buildings are separated by alleys too narrow for cars or trucks. People live and men sell their wares as did their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, and further back for as many as 12 centuries. By their sides you often see their sons—youngsters whose own sons and grandsons will carry on the family name and the family tradition into whatever future there may be.
Buildings constantly require bracing, refurbishing, or outright rebuilding, and this is always done in the ageless style of those around it.
The only skyscrapers are minarets, the mosque towers from which the call to prayer is sung, both in a style that hasn’t changed in the last 14 centuries.
At the other end of population density is the Sahara. Yes, there are tire tracks in the sand, but they are no match for the wind.
Yes, Bedouin nomads man the tourist tent camps, perform their music for visitors, and even assist us in climbing the dunes. Still their traditional life remains as it has since before the arrival of history. Their ability to find water by smelling it has not disappeared. Their harmony with the desert remains.
Being a traveler on a two-week tour in Morocco, you don’t get to know a lot. But you do get to feel a lot. You see people living peacefully in conditions of intense crowdedness and no apparent luxury. You see people whose standard of excellence is drawn from living up to tradition rather than from accumulation.
If a driver honks, it’s simply to let you know he’s there. Most often he doesn’t think that’s all that important.
Haggling is not so much a contest as a process of coming to agreement: the buyer finding a price which he’s willing to pay; the seller finding the price he can accept.
Private ownership of guns is illegal in Morocco.
The only people you see drinking alcoholic beverages are tourists.
There is a feeling that knowledge and concern do not spread themselves horizontally as much as run vertically: up to the heavens and down into the earth. There is a feeling of spirituality that permeates everything, even when it does so by its startling absence.
When I stepped out of my tent in the Sahara on our final morning there, I heard myself say, “I’m not leaving.” I hope I was right.
Discover the timeless traditions that thrive in both the cities and the desert on OAT’s Morocco Sahara Odyssey adventure.