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It was finally time to take my most ambitious trip – a culmination of everything I’d learned along the way during my flight-free project. The plan was always to conclude my journey – or at least, this particular chapter of it – by reaching another continent. It’s all well and good to wax lyrical about the beauty of the UK, the wonders of western Europe, the pleasures of exploring by train, bike and foot. But I wanted to go further; to prove to myself, if no one else, that I could stretch the same principles of slow travel to somewhere not on the metaphorical doorstep. (And my deep-dive into the future of carbon-neutral aviation had shown me that, while there were exciting tech developments afoot, it would be a long wait before I could possibly hope to fly anything approaching even medium haul ‘sustainably’.)
Originally, this was to be North America by cargo ship: an epic three-week trip, much of which would be at sea, taking in Nova Scotia, New York and Baltimore before making the return across the Atlantic to Liverpool. Eight days or more each way, without internet, without phone signal, with nothing but the barest of facilities on board to keep one entertained (a luxury cruise it is not). Well, Covid put paid to that, along with so many other things; the US closed its borders to UK travellers for almost twenty months during the height of the pandemic.
Back to the drawing board, then, but the new-continent idea still appealed, as did riding the waves and setting sail for new lands. Minimising border crossings was also a key consideration at a time when pandemic restrictions turned each one into a Kafkaesque exercise in mind-melting bureaucracy involving forms, apps, tests and reams of paperwork.
Africa would be something, I thought. Somehow, in my previous whirlwind of far-flung air travel, I’d never set foot there. In some ways, the pandemic simplified matters – so much of the continent was, fairly or not, on the UK’s ‘red list’ when I was in planning mode, dictating that returning travellers would have to stump up thousands of pounds to spend ten days in a designated ‘quarantine hotel’. Not really my style. But Morocco had escaped this fate; Morocco with its plethora of ferry services connecting it to mainland Europe.
The sea border with Spain was closed – ‘temporarily’ but also indefinitely – meaning the swift hop between Tangier and Tarifa was off limits. This left Italy and France on the table, with the latter offering a forty-hour or so sailing between Marseille and Tangier. Straightforward enough: it would only involve crossing two borders, and two trains to reach the port. In ‘normal’ times, it would have been an exciting prospect. In abnormal times, I had so little faith that I could pull it off I kept delaying booking my hotel accommodation even after I had spent an eye-watering sum on the return ferry. Three days to go; I still hadn’t booked. Two days; it probably wouldn’t happen. One day; OK, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to reserve something …
Considering I was only going to be passing through one extra country to reach my final destination, the details on precisely what would be needed to gain entry seemed wilfully obscure. If I were flying directly from the UK I could simply present a negative PCR test. As I was travelling via France, I would also need to present my fully vaccinated status to avoid quarantine in Morocco, yet the Foreign Office advice stated that the country didn’t ‘officially recognise’ the UK’s proof of vaccination. The experience made me realise just what a pampered, sheltered little traveller I’ve always been – safe in the knowledge that I am welcome in nearly all countries, rarely required to obtain a visa, and able to flash a smile to border police as I sashay by with the unearned confidence of a Caucasian woman from a wealthy nation. This was a different ball game: I rang the embassy, wrote to the British consul in Morocco, had several conversations with the ferry company, La Meridionale, all conducted in my woeful schoolgirl French, to ascertain whether they’d even let me in the country. When I told people about my upcoming trip, it was with a heavy note of scepticism designed to dampen any excitement. ‘I just don’t really believe it’s going to happen,’ I said, shaking my head with a rueful chuckle like some world-weary cynic who’s seen too much of this cruel life to feel hope anymore.
But happen it did. I turned up at St Pancras station, which by now felt something of a spiritual home after months of terrestrial-only travel, armed with a folder of carefully ordered travel documents and the conviction I’d be back home again with my tail tucked between my legs within forty-eight hours. But breezing through passport control and taking a seat in the departures lounge, I finally felt it – the emotion I’d mourned without ever quite realising I was missing it. That rumbling growl of pleasure in the pit of the stomach that switches on, a key turned in the ignition, at the start of a solo adventure; that soul-deep joy of contemplating the unknown adventures that lie ahead, just out of sight.
‘À piedtons? Pas de voiture?’ The man looked me up and down. I nodded enthusiastically.
‘Oui! Je cherche le bateau pour Maroc!’ I trilled.
He looked me up and down again.
As much as his stern, made-of-stone face would allow – a face that spoke of having seen it all, and then some – he appeared … surprised. He held up a finger and sauntered off to make a call.
Turning up as a foot passenger for a ferry in Marseille is not the simple, carefree pastime one might imagine – a fact I learned upon arriving at its expansive port. You are like some enchanted yet cursed thing, a unicorn wandered in from a mythical glade, commanding a heady mixture of awe and fear in all who cross your path.
I had spent the most enchanting evening and morning in this, one of my favourite French cities, with its gruff, unpolished charm. Arriving at St Charles station, from whose lofty position you are treated to stellar views of France’s second city, I was still dazzled by the swiftness of the train journey. Even without the previous direct Eurostar service (cut when the pandemic decimated demand), it’s impressive: at 12.29 p.m., I’d been in London; six and a half hours later, after a quick change in Paris, I was in Marseille.
I lugged my bags over to the Intercontinental, the city’s premier grande dame hotel, and set out for dinner. Despite it being a Monday night, I was turned away again and again without a reservation, which, though galling, was gratifying in so much as it indicated an upturn in the city’s fortunes after Covid had left it emptied out. On the fourth try I managed to bag a table by the evocative old port, where I waited an inordinate amount of time for moules frites under the twinkling fairy lights of the outdoor terrace.
The next morning, I took an obligatory selfie at the Port Vieux Pavilion, the famed harbourside mirrored canopy; I stuffed myself with a lunch of grilled sardines and panisses (chickpea fries) under the shade of a striped parasol on a pedestrian square.
And then, to the practicalities. If you haven’t already picked up on this, I’m a bit of a tight wad. I often joke about my colleague Simon Calder’s miserly approach to spending money (why book an expensive flight when you can hitchhike across three countries to catch a cheaper one?), but it turns out I’m cut from a very similar cloth. With no wish to pay the exorbitant prices for food and drink on board the ferry, I made a detour to Lidl, buying enough crisps, biscuits, bread, cheese, wine and chocolate to last a week rather than a day and a half. (The great news is, you can take all this and more – so much more! – on the boat with zero weight limits or restrictions on liquids. Take that, aviation.)
This is how I turned up at the pedestrian access point at Marseille port, a tram ride away from the city centre: laden down with a suitcase, rucksack, bum-bag and oversized shopping bag, a baguette cheekily peaking over the top. I don’t know what I’d expected; something that even slightly resembled the airport experience, perhaps? And maybe it was ever thus pre-pandemic. But not now. At the gate, I showed my ticket and passport and was told to ‘Suivez la ligne verte’ – a green line painted on the ground – and off I trundled, five minutes later coming to a building that declared itself the pedestrian point of departure for Tanger et Corsica. Parfait! But a serious-looking metal grate was pulled in front of the locked door; a peer in the windows confirmed a very obviously empty departures hall. I wandered around, looking my default setting of vague and hapless, when I came across the aforementioned man in high vis – the international symbol for someone who knows what’s what.
After a swift call, he intimated that the boat was at the next dock along, or whatever the correct terminology is, and enquired as to how I would get there. ‘Je peux marcher?’ He raised an eyebrow and shook his head wearily at the ignorance of youth, or perhaps landlubbers. Gruffly telling me we needed to hot-tail it there so I could check in toute suite, he jabbed a thumb at his van while I murmured ‘merci, merci beaucoup, vous êtes très gentil’ on repeat like an idiot. Pedal to the floor, he whipped me down a long stretch of road, and I realised why my offer of walking was met with such disdain. Ports are BIG. Like, really, really big. It took a good ten minutes to drive a distance that would surely have taken me upwards of an hour on foot, broiling under the afternoon sun. We pulled up sharply and he deposited me with a curt nod, leaving me a strange mixture of grateful and, to be perfectly honest, a little aroused by his take-charge, no-nonsense attitude.
After all the urgency, I flung my various documents at the lady behind the portacabin desk. I identified, despite the shaky start, a rush of what can only be described as pride at my ability to smoothly present each in quick succession thanks to my trav-min folder. They popped up like fairy minions called to Titania’s aid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Passport? Ready! Proof of negative Covid test? And I! Forme sanitaire for entering Morocco? And I! Proof of vaccination? And I! If this woman was in any way impressed, she didn’t let it show, but no matter; I’d impressed myself.
Everything was in order – mais bien sûr – and I finally relaxed as I was told to wait. Time passed. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. Official-looking people came and went, barking orders into walkie-talkies, but no other travellers joined me. I started to get the sneaking suspicion that I was the only foot passenger on this ferry; and then I started to get the sneaking suspicion that they had forgotten about the crazy English woman with the many, many bags. Cars kept trundling slowly through gates, and it occurred to me for the first time that the only reason most would make the forty-hour pilgrimage by sea is because they have to take a vehicle – they’re transporting goods or returning home after a long stay in France with family. Otherwise, why on earth wouldn’t you fly? By this point in the book we all know why – but I hadn’t quite pieced together beforehand that I would be something of an anomaly.
Eventually, just as I started to feel a bit panicky – and like there might be a very real chance I’d have to run after the boat waving my ticket and screeching ‘Attendez!’ – an official-looking man directed me to my second van of the day. I was a ‘foot passenger’ in name only; to board the vessel, I’d have to rely on four wheels like everyone else. We sat and waited in the painfully slow-moving line of cars; with time to kill we got chatting, in so far as that’s possible with a lack of shared language. Why was I going by ferry, he queried, looking at me with the same expression I came to recognise in most people’s eyes when I relayed the finer details of my journey – like I had just escaped from the asylum. I did my best to explain in garbled French: that I had given up flying, that I was doing it because of climate change, that I was writing a book about flight-free travel – ‘voyager sans voler’ – and he perked up considerably, telling me he hated planes, and airports, and everything that went along with them.
The whole process was lengthier and more complicated than getting on an aircraft, of course – I had to present my passport a total of four times, read ’em and weep, before boarding – but when we finally drove up on deck I was dispatched with a grin and a promise that my new friend-slash-chauffeur would be there to help me disembark when I returned the following week. It felt, in all honesty, like a real achievement to have made it this far – and I hadn’t even set off yet.
We set sail under a sunset so spectacular it made my eyes swim with tears. Clouds flitted, chameleon-like, from candyfloss to baby pink, brightening to flaming, dayglo neon the colour of a school highlighter before, just as quickly, darkening to bleeding raspberry.
Passengers and crew gathered side by side at the ship’s prow and a reverent hush fell – no one talked or laughed as we went forth to meet the coming night. The atmosphere was that of a vigil, a midnight mass, with the sky in flames above our heads. It struck me that there was nothing cold or clinical about this kind of travel: nothing of the anonymous airport lounge, the identikit safety talk, the fasten-your-seatbelt sign. As I stood, gazing upon the gently undulating water and reflected strobe flashes of lighthouses in the distance, I caught a glimpse of a plane overhead. I thought about how easy it would have been had I been on it – tickets purchased at the touch of a button, seamless check-in, the sheer speed at which I would have been hurled from A to B, touching down before my body had quite made sense of the journey. And I found that no part of me desired to be on that metal bird. Not just because of the emissions it was carelessly spewing into the atmosphere – emissions I now knew we have no real way of undoing as yet – but because it was transport without adventure, without the unknown, without the true sensation of travelling at all.
I didn’t regret my decision later that night, either, as I curled up in the lower bunk of my cabin. Sleeping on a ship is not like sleeping on a train, let me assure you. There is no rattling track, no train announcements on repeat, and no screech of wheel on rail or rapid shaking of cabin to keep you awake. There is only the soft rolling of waves, like a mother lovingly rocking you to sleep in a cradle; there is only a deep, rumbling vibration, like a panther purring as it lies in the sun, to lull you into slumber.
The next day brought more exploration of my trusty vessel, the Pelagos. It was … basic, if we’re being polite. If we’re being less polite, it was devoid of all but the scantest facilities, limited to a run-down ‘lounge’ and self-service restaurant only open at certain hours. Even my dreams of the deck being furnished with plentiful, quality seating turned out to be misguided. A handful of benches were haphazardly wedged in, half of them crossed by fluttering red and white tape indicating they were off-limits (which my fellow passengers studiously ignored and sat on regardless, much to their credit). And yet none of it really mattered.
The sea was the main event, plunging everyone on board into a zen-like, meditative state. The ceaseless, gentle movement; the navy waves accented with liquid mercury wherever the sun’s rays struck. There was nothing to see but occasional ships. There was nothing to hear but the wind, billowing the T-shirts of straight-backed men who stood stoically at the prow, hands clasped behind their backs, as they gazed out at that vast blue expanse in respectful silence.
Thoughts ran slow and heavy, inspired by our unhurried, stately pace. I shuffled to my cabin and back; inhaled giant bags of crisps; read my book. Unlike the cramped confines of an aircraft, here one could stretch out, move from place to place, ‘take a turn about the deck’ to contemplate once more the 360° seascape: it was like being on the ultimate digital detox.
When night fell, I went and stood outside to feel the pang of fear that comes with seeing the sea minus the comfort of daylight to tame its raw power. The fact that the wind could whip me overboard to scream helplessly into the void suddenly felt much more immediate. The palette was all in greyscale, as if colour had been sucked out of the universe: the sky charcoal, the sea a deeper shade of sable. And, above it all, the stars in HD clarity, sharp pinpricks of white carelessly scattered across the night’s sky. The pattern of constellations was clear to those who’d ever bothered to learn them (I, most definitely, had not) and I understood the phrase ‘starstruck’ as never before, prompted to contemplate my smallness amid the grandeur of the universe – thoughts, it must be said, more usually associated with bong hits in dorm rooms.
The next day, the ghosts of mountains haunted my eyes as I stood unofficial sentry, I-spy-with-my-little-eye-ing for land. Was it cloud, that shadow up ahead? Or was it the shoreline? Then, unmistakably, there it was – a great mass, far off in the distance. Pale and faded as an old pair of jeans but growing ever more defined as we approached.
We all took to the deck again as we drew closer to Tangier, the boat flanked by Spain to one side and Morocco on the other. Unlike flying, when your destination looks small and inconsequential from above until all of a sudden you’ve touched down and you’re in the landscape, the slow, steady arrival by sea makes for a humbling experience. It was I who felt insignificant – mountains loomed ahead and the full might of the working docks, with their larger-than-life cranes and shipping containers, swung into view.
The excitement was palpable as we approached – an excitement that, to me, was inextricably linked with the length of time it took to reach our destination. I had a brief pang as I thought about the original trip I’d planned to North America. Imagine the feeling of reaching Canada after eight days at sea! Imagine this sense of miraculous wonder magnified and multiplied tenfold! I waited till the last second to duck back inside the ship, gazing greedily at this new continent I’d never set foot on before. What would happen next, I was blissfully unsure of. How to even escape the machinations of Tangier’s industry-laden port? But that was for future Helen to worry about. Present Helen could only sigh, and smile, and I-spy-with-her-little-eye, something beginning with … ‘T’.
‘Hello miss, hello?’
‘Bonjour, you can’t hear me?’
‘You very beautiful miss! You want Moroccan boyfriend?’
The calls followed me down the Tangier streets amid the clamour of countless other unfamiliar noises – the disturbing howl of cats that had learned to mimic the sound of human babies, constant shouts across the road in French and Arabic, whistles, hisses. I felt my Westernness, my otherness, shrieking out like a beacon. My skin, too white; my hair, too light. A stranger in a strange land.
I had been told before coming that being a solo female in Morocco would bring with it a certain level of unavoidable harassment. But while forewarned is forearmed, it was still a shock to the system after the calm reverie of the boat. There was so much else to take in – the pungent aroma of spices mingled with fresh mint, the technicolour brightness of climbing purple flowers on dazzling white buildings, the overbearing sun that forced me to slow my gait from high-speed commuter walk to lazy stride – that the unabashed stares and catcalling were overwhelming. I imagine it was less intense in better days, when the country was thronged with tourists and obvious foreigners – but the pandemic had left Morocco bereft of its usual 13 million annual visitors.1 The country’s official ‘Vision 2020’ tourism strategy had aimed to attract 20 million visitors by the end of 2020, an ambitious target that was completely laid to waste by coronavirus restrictions.
It’s hard to hide your alien nature, too, when you’re constantly lost. I steered down the wrong streets of Tangier’s charming yet maze-like fifteenth-century medina again and again, hitting dead ends at every turn. But then, a blessed flash of turquoise! I was back on the main artery, looking through an arched doorway in the rampart walls, perfectly framing the sea – it always comes back to the sea in Tangier – and I walked underneath to stand and feel the breeze bringing me back to myself.
Tangier is perhaps the perfect example of Morocco’s status as the gateway between Europe and Africa; the epitome of a city combining two continents in its genetic make-up. Spain is so close, after all, that you feel you could touch it. And Tangier’s geographical location, jutting out jauntily into the Straits of Gibraltar – stretching towards the European mainland as if reaching out a beckoning hand – has always seen it hold a position of strategic importance. It was practically begging to be seized by every empire going, I learned inside the cool, quiet, intricately adorned halls of the Kasbah Museum, which brings together objects from the city’s history under various occupations. The Romans, the Byzantine Empire, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English – all left their mark. When the rest of Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912, Tangier was deemed so important it was given its own special status, overseen administratively by a commission made up of various European countries, including Britain, until Morocco finally gained independence in 1956.
To some extent, this rich and varied history is reflected in the population of the city itself: cosmopolitan in the truest sense of the world, a melting pot where different accents, nationalities, cultures and styles all rub along together. It was evidenced, too, when I took myself on a café crawl through some of Tangier’s storied tea salons and coffee houses. I started at the iconic, stripped-back Café Hafa, founded in 1921 and located on tumbling steps built into the cliff face overlooking the sea. Plastic chairs are set up, backs to the wall, facing the water like viewing platforms; the waiters perform an elegant, non-stop dance dispensing glass after glass of sugar-laden mint tea, picking up leaf-filled empties as they go.
At the other end of the spectrum was the hipster-feeling café inside Tangier’s beautifully restored art deco Cinéma Rif. Here, the cool kids hang out inside, chain-smoking and working on laptops surrounded by vintage movie posters.
Café Baba was different again. Up steep steps in the medina, and proudly advertising its affiliation with the Rolling Stones (who paid a visit many moons ago) with a faded framed poster on the wall, it has the kind of shabby authenticity that marks it as the antithesis of a tourist trap, despite the former famous clientele. The blue-green floor tiles were chipped, the assortment of leather chairs battered, but it was clearly the place to be – big groups of men had congregated, talking over each other, playing YouTube clips on phones. A chicly dishevelled woman smoked languidly in the corner while bashing away on her computer as if the keys had personally offended her, instantly earning her a spot as my new personal hero. I returned to thé à la menthe, bewildered once more at the way a searingly hot, sickeningly sweet drink can simultaneously cool you down and alleviate a sun-induced headache.
And finally there was an espresso at Café de Paris – all brown leather banquettes and polished wood – a mirror of the long-standing French influence on the city.
Once I’d shaken off my initial apprehension at being a woman alone somewhere new, I quickly felt what many generations of visitors before me had – that Tangier is a place where almost anyone could feel at home. Like its fellow port city brethren across the globe, here there is an unspoken, intangible welcome to outsiders who decide to set up shop. This was certainly true of the owners of my Tangier base, La Maison de Tanger, a beautiful boutique hotel oozing French colonial elegance. At the time of my visit it had recently been bought by a supremely cool collective, Hopeful Tragedy Records – a French-Canadian record label and band whose co-founder fell hard for the city during a visit after the death of his father.
Twenty-four hours was all it took to become more acclimatised to the hustle and the heat. As I walked through it all on my way to dinner, unhurried and serene, I realised there was no malice lurking beneath the frequent ‘bonjours’. Overtures felt more like a reflex than anything else and, with practice, faded to a mild buzzing in my ear.
That night I ate like a duchess at a locals’ joint where I was served five courses of expertly cooked seafood for the equivalent of £13. I was still reeling from the extraordinariness of it ninety minutes later as, stuffed as a stuck pig, I rose up on my trotters and made my way back to the hotel to sit in the sunken garden and consider my supreme good fortune. Thirty hours after arriving in Tangier, I felt I might just be in love.
I realised how naïve I’d been to consider Tangier’s medina even vaguely ‘mazelike’ on my first full day in Fes. Ha! Tangier didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘maze’. It hadn’t even a nodding acquaintance with the term ‘labyrinthine’. The tangle of streets that make up Fes’s epic, 540-acre medina LAUGH IN THE FACE of all other walled cities. It is thought to be the largest pedestrian zone in the world, made up of some 9,000 streets, lanes and alleys, many with no official names, let alone signs.
People who’ve lived their entire lives inside its maddening web can get lost. As a tourist, there’s no point in doing anything other than accepting the fact you will never know where you are or where you’re going and embracing a ‘go with the flow’ mantra. That, or get a guide.
I opted for the latter. ‘It’s “Fes”, not “Fez”,’ Jamal clarified as we clambered from his car to the fourteenth-century Marinid Tombs, high above the city, to take in the view. ‘With a “z”, it’s the hat; with an “s”, it means pickaxe in Arabic – because legend has it that’s what the founder, Idris I, used to mark out the parameters of the city.’ Only from this elevation is it really possible to take in the sheer scale of the Fes el Bali medina, dating from the ninth century and a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981. It is huge, home to more than 100,000 people at one point; that number had since shrunk to around 60,000.
Fes is really three cities in one, with distinct sections: Fes el Bali, Fes Jdid (which includes the Jewish Mellah quarter) and the Nouvelle Ville or new town (this last furnished with a McDonald’s, Starbucks and all manner of Western accoutrements one has absolutely no desire to see as a tourist). We took a drive through the Mellah, taking in the different architectural style to the Islamic one seen in the medina: ‘Doesn’t it look like New Orleans?’ Jamal prompted, and I could just about see what he meant, with its buttermilk buildings, covered wooden balconies, green awnings and lamps slung across the wide streets.
Then it was time to take a deep-dive into the ancient walled city itself. ‘People live the same way they have for hundreds of years here,’ Jamal said as we strolled through narrow, hectic lanes, packed with noise and movement. Chickens clucked and settled their feathers; mules and donkeys gave gentle snuffles as they patiently waited in the shade. We ducked into a bakery where a terse man, fag in mouth, relentlessly shovelled loaves into a huge, wood-fired oven and removed them when cooked. These weren’t for sale – local women made their bread at home and dropped it off to be baked for a few dirhams. (In a pleasantly sustainable twist, the heat from the bread oven is also used to warm the waters of the neighbouring hammam.) The most astounding thing to me, as someone who barely knows her neighbours to give a passing hello to, was that the baker knew every woman’s bread by eye; none of it was labelled, nothing was written down. ‘He knows it from looking at the dough,’ said Jamal. ‘The colour, the shape, the texture.’
We escaped the heat at a former madrassa, or Islamic school, covered in phenomenal mosaic work; we stopped for fava bean soup topped with olive oil, garlic and chilli pepper at a hole in the wall, followed by prickly pears from a street cart. And then it was time for me to receive more compliments in ninety minutes than I’ve had in the entire rest of my time on Earth.
‘Your face shines bright with goodness,’ the man in the rug shop pronounced, staring into my eyes with an intensity that thrilled and scared me in equal measure. ‘Bright with goodness, like the skin of the moon.’
Now, I don’t really care if a comment like that is true or not (although, hey, let’s go ahead and assume it is). After eighteen months of lockdowns, a heart-rending break-up and some very lacklustre meet-ups via the dreaded dating apps, it was, I’m not ashamed to admit, nice to spend a day hearing assorted men gasp as I removed my sunglasses, accompanied by cries of ‘Madame! Stop! Your eyes! They are TOO BEAUTIFUL!’ Of course, these proclamations went hand in hand with trying to flog me a hand-woven bedspread, leather jacket and assorted cosmetics made of argan oil, and I was largely immune to the sales pitches – but I’ll be damned if I didn’t almost spend £300 on a rug after the ‘skin of the moon’ comparison. That one was pure poetry.
The medina is jammed full of specialised artisans, crafting bespoke wares using the same painstaking methods that have been used for centuries. But traditional arts like this are slowly dying out, and not just because younger generations can’t concentrate on anything for more than five minutes (thanks, social media), but because of Chinese imports. Much of what gets sold in the souks now – here and elsewhere in Morocco – is not Moroccan at all, but imported from Asia. It’s cheap, mass-produced crap, with none of the craftsmanship or expertise displayed in the real deal. ‘But people don’t care about quality, they care about price,’ Jamal said sadly. The artisans simply can’t compete on that score; not when a piece of hand-woven cloth might take five to ten days to complete. Not when one brass filigree lamp takes months of labour in the design and execution.
One area in which the government is trying to counteract this is the ceramics district, moved out of the medina to its own stand-alone location by UNESCO when they realised the smoke produced by the kilns probably wasn’t all that great for human lungs. Here, they produce goods out of grey clay – vastly superior to the terracotta used elsewhere in Morocco, due to its mineral-dense make-up, I was repeatedly informed – which get shipped all over the world at a price subsidised by the government to encourage foreigners to buy.
I stepped into a treasure trove of pottery, a riot of colour splashed on everything from tea sets to custom-made fountains, and was again assaulted by a barrage of compliments. ‘You have a soft voice, so gentle – I greatly admire your way of speaking,’ the owner told me. Well, shucks. For once, I decided to loosen the cheapskate purse strings a little and buy something to remember my trip. I spotted a tagine in a combination I liked – bright blue the colour of the Moroccan sky with finely painted navy designs – just begging to be taken home and cooked in using the poor excuse for ras-el-hanout sold in my local Waitrose. I’ve never been remotely good at haggling, but we both gamely played our parts, me pretending to give it a go and the salesman pretending I was robbing him blind. Declaring me ‘drifa’, which turned out to mean kind and charming, he threw in a Hand of Fatima tile – thought to bring good luck – and I left in a flurry of blushes, not really giving two hoots if I’d vastly overpaid.
My entry into Rabat was not the most elegant of arrivals. Only realising we’d stopped at Centre Ville station after my carriage companion alerted me, I hustled my bags off the train in such a hurry that I tripped over my suitcase, landing face first in the dust. I followed this up by stumbling the wrong way down the platform, a fact that was brought to my attention when the train driver honked his very, very loud train horn at me and yelled, ‘L’autre direction, Madame!’ Every single person at the station turned to stare at me with polite interest. They carried on staring long after I’d murmured my thanks and amended my course, I can only assume to see what other amusingly stupid thing I might do next.
In my defence, Rabat Centre Ville station was something of a work in progress, with no signs and, in fact, no way to exit the platform other than lugging one’s bags over the train tracks. It was much the same throughout the Moroccan capital. Everywhere I looked were cranes, diggers, men in hard hats and piles of rubble. The whole place was ‘under construction, undergoing improvements, making renovations’ – and not in a bad way. Rather, it gave the impression of being a city on the make; a town cresting the wave of a swelling surge of regeneration. The downside was that most of the city’s big attractions were closed while work was being completed: the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, the Hassan Tower, the Chellah Necropolis and neighbouring Jewish cemetery. All were off limits.
I ascertained this first-hand as I headed out on what ended up being an extensive walking tour. There is a size and sprawl to Rabat, a grandeur and scale to its buildings that eclipsed the proportions I’d seen elsewhere. It is this, as much as anything, that marks it out as the country’s administrative capital. Without really meaning to, I trekked kilometres upon kilometres on roads shaded by orderly lines of palm trees. But it certainly wasn’t thankless: there’s nothing like travelling on foot to get a deep-rooted sense of place, as my Spanish pilgrimage had already taught me.
If Fes was like going back in time, Rabat brought me screeching back into the twenty-first century. The second I stepped out of the station and into the Nouvelle Ville district, I felt it – a young and vibrant dynamism that was almost palpable. It had the most modern energy of any destination on my Moroccan tour – the city where I felt, without doubt, the most comfortable as a woman travelling toute seule. Maybe it’s because there are so many young people, maybe it’s because plenty of them have adopted a less conservative style of dress – I saw scores of women in miniskirts, heads uncovered – but I walked the streets with increasing confidence, left largely to my own devices. After the days in Fes, where my tourist status earned me an unending string of unsolicited greetings, it was like stepping from sweltering heat to delicious shade. I remembered how much I enjoy the anonymity of an urban escape – the sensation of seeing rather than being seen.
The arts were still open to me, and so I explored the Mohammed VI Museum of Contemporary Arts, a swish facility housing contemporary Moroccan artists in permanent collections alongside temporary exhibitions. It’s as good a way as any to understand the country’s fluctuating sense of identity: artists were influenced by European styles for much of the twentieth century; there followed a backlash and a resurgence of a more ‘local’ Moroccan aesthetic; and then the universality of art took over as contemporary creatives sought to find their own unique voice in an increasingly globalised world.
From there it was a swift walk to Villa des Arts, a set of beautifully restored art deco buildings from the 1920s housing contemporary art exhibitions, where my soul found rest in its peaceful gardens, filled with the sound of birdsong.
It may boast a more modern sensibility but this is still Morocco – and so there is, of course, a medina. After my experiences in Tangier and Fes, I was fully ready to get lost – but Rabat’s version is a different beast entirely, comprised of wide, well-ordered streets with clear names, several major arteries and a grid-like layout that even Google Maps can navigate without throwing a tantrum. The style is different, too – most of the architecture dates from the seventeenth century, when Muslims from Spain’s Andalusia region arrived. The west side has a more seedy, Western feel – shops flogging plastic tat, restaurants selling Tex-Mex – while eastwards things become more traditional, with holes-in-the-wall and stalls to buy loaves and pastries, fruit and veg, herbs and spices. It doesn’t have quite the charm of the more ancient medinas, but it does offer the advantage of being able to stroll freely – to stop, look, listen, smell – without being accosted every few metres. I ambled through as afternoon melted to evening, taking in the blue and white buildings and admiring the traditional wooden doorways.
On my final morning I took advantage of Rabat’s coastal position and made a beeline for the beach – not the nicest, with slightly gritty sand underfoot, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’m near the sea and don’t get in it. The waves here are fierce – it’s not a place for a proper swim – so I joined the crowds of locals striding into the water to cool off, staying in the shallows but letting the swells hit me chest-high. Behind me lay the sand-coloured Oudaias Kasbah, dating from the twelfth century; further along the Oued Bou Regreg river lay the fluid, futuristic white curves of the Zaha Hadid-designed Grand Théâtre de Rabat, in its last stages of construction. The perfect reflection of a city rooted in history but looking ever forward.
That afternoon I was back on the train, the splendid high-speed Al-Boraq – the fastest railway line in all of Africa – that whizzed me between Rabat and Tangier in an hour and twenty minutes. Train travel in Morocco is, in this newbie’s experience, just plain wonderful. Cheap, punctual, regular and well-connected – and it’s undoubtedly the best way to see the country, allowing you to watch rugged countryside give way to cityscapes through the window.
From Tangier it was back to Tanger Med, the port, where I was once again treated to wide-eyed stares of disbelief as I turned up on just the legs God gave me with no car in sight. I’ll tell you how unused to foot passengers they were – I had to wait for fifteen minutes while they tracked down the only guy qualified to man the passport control desk. He was deeply suspicious of me, and made no attempt to hide it, looking from my face to my passport picture – up and down, up and down – for a full minute, before asking incredulously: ‘This is you?’ Even if it wasn’t, I’m not likely to admit it, am I?, I thought, somewhat deflated by the notion that I must have aged horribly since 2015 to prompt such misgivings.
Eventually I was ushered through, to sit in a hall the size of an aircraft hangar filled with hundreds of seats – every one of them empty. I’d blithely assumed I’d be able to board the boat on arrival, settle into my cabin, fully explore below decks. Not so. Instead, I spent a strange, enchanted four-hour stint alone in the giant departures hall, feeling like the last-known survivor of the apocalypse. Sustenance came courtesy of a wall of vending machines selling hefty slices of cake for less than 20p a pop; entertainment was derived from using the space to perform an elaborate interpretive dance, safe in the knowledge that there were zero witnesses. I was, quite literally, dancing like no one was watching.
Time slipped by shimmering and eel-like: one minute, I was bemoaning my long wait on Twitter; the next I was being given the nod to board the shuttle bus to reach the ferry. Once aboard, the difference in quality between this and my outbound passage was stark: it was Titanic-like by comparison. There was a handsome bar, restaurant, mirrored tables and velvet chairs upholstered in dusky pink and powder blue lined along floor-to-ceiling windows to show off the sea to her best advantage. Fairly standard on lengthy ferry crossings, but after the spartan conditions of the initial crossing, I felt myself ensconced in a heady world of luxury.
Forty hours felt like four amid such splendour, and before I knew it we were chugging our way into Marseille. From our unique vantage, I could appreciate the city’s name displayed in giant letters on a hillside, much like the Hollywood sign (pure class, that). One more bout of feeling oh-so-special awaited – as the only foot passenger, I was fussed over by the dockside ferry workers, told I was a VIP and dubbed ‘the queen of Meridionale’, before being driven fifteen minutes out of their way so that I’d be within easy reach of the train station for my return journey to Paris. A final day of sightseeing awaited. A final day of eating and seeing and doing impossibly exciting new things. A final day of adventure.
There is a moment in Morocco – one of those perfect moments you know you’ll remember for many years to come, maybe even a lifetime – that perhaps sums up better than anything my entire flight-free experience.
I am on the roof terrace of an elegant riad-turned-restaurant, drinking a frosty glass of vodka and pomegranate juice. The alcohol hits in just the right places and I feel loose-limbed and content as the sun ebbs away. The call to prayer erupts all around me, the sound alien and otherworldly, while the air is warm without being humid. I feel so wonderfully far from home and it assaults me all at once – the miracle that I am here, in this place.
It might sound strange given all my travels, but I am not, by nature, a very adventurous person. Honest. I’m timid in unfamiliar settings surrounded by strangers; I rarely take the lead in new situations; I’m not the sort of person who can conceive of going on a ‘spontaneous’ trip without planning every element down to the tiniest, most banal detail. And yet here I am – on a rooftop in Fes, feeling the bath-warm night come to life around me as the sky achieves an indescribably beautiful ombré of lemon morphing into midnight blue. I got here all by myself, over land and sea, despite the overwhelming amount of red tape that had to be deftly skirted to make it happen. As I think of it – as I think of all the terrestrial trips I’ve taken – a small but determined flicker of pride lights up my insides. I’ve learned that I can get out of my comfort zone by taking things a step at a time, one after another, until I wind up somewhere impossibly gorgeous and exotic, sipping cocktails in the soft evening light. It makes me feel as if anything were possible; as if I am strong, and powerful, and capable.
Flight-free travel is so much more than a climate commitment – so different from the exercise in joyless self-denial and martyrdom I originally thought it might be. Rather than limiting my opportunities, it has done the exact opposite: opening me up to a mind-bending new world of possibilities. More than that, in fact – opening me up to parts of myself I never knew existed. I am reminded once more of train guru Mark Smith’s wise words early on in this project:
Booking flights is easy – but a nightmare to do and it doesn’t give you anything back when you actually do it. Booking trains is hard – it’s a challenge. But when you actually do it and make the journey, it’s wonderful. It’s like everything else in life: if you put more effort in, you get a lot more out.
After eighteen flight-free months, months in which the pandemic made travel more difficult than it’s ever been in my lifetime, I finally understand exactly what he meant. I have never had such poignant experiences; never felt such a heady mix of emotions; never discovered such a well-defined sense of purpose and adventure. I may have stopped flying, but I feel like I have finally started travelling.
What started as a New Year’s resolution – to avoid flying for twelve months – has become a whole new way of life. I thought finishing this book would be where my flight-free journey ended; and yet, as it turns out, it feels like this is just the beginning.
Carbon comparison
560kg of CO2e for a return flight London Heathrow–Tangier2
26.8kg of CO2e for a return train London St Pancras–Marseille;3 433kg of CO2e for a return ferry Marseille–Tangier4
= 459.8kg of CO2e
Carbon emissions saved: 100.2kg of CO2e
Total carbon emissions saved for all flight-free journeys: 785.3kg of CO2e