touts

Everything I read on Morocco warned me against the various dangers of fake tour guides and ne’er do wells who wanted to drag me to their or a friend’s store. According to reputation they are aggressive and swarming, not giving a person a moment’s peace.

Perhaps because the mental world one builds after reading such warnings is often more vicious than the real one I was not as horribly harassed as I might have thought. Apparently there have also been recent efforts to crack down on those ruining the tourist experience too forcefully. Still, I met many fine people wanting to sell me things. The sheer volume that I could write on this is already tiring me so I’ve been quite savage in trying to keep it short and even a little subdivided and organized.

Shopkeepers who said hello were stuck to their shops and could be walked by easily, despite offers of a free look around. “Why the rush?” Sometimes if the shop were off a main thoroughfare people with limited English would just point at a sign and say ‘Berber carpets’ making the ignoring process even simpler.

When arriving in a town people would offer cheap hotels, sometimes jumping to your side three steps before your chosen door, then acting like they had some role in your arrival.

Walking around you were likely to be asked what you were looking for, or simply be told X tourist site was the other way, that gate is locked, or whatever. I liked the fellow in Tanger who started telling me a gate was locked he was the gatekeeper and I should turn around. I told him I’d risk it and he started yelling that I didn’t believe him. By that point I was already at the unlockable gate, and he had never broken his pace in an attempt to convince me so I think he was a friendly insane person more than anything else.

The most irritating aspect of these people is when you are simply wandering and a road you are about to go up suddenly becomes no go because some guy has just pointed up it and said ‘synagogue’ or ‘garden’ or whatever. To go up it then would lead to some argument over payment that I would rather just avoid. I assume someone must tip these people, or why else would they bother.

While I feel the situation is not as horrible as some books make it out to be, it can wear on you after a while. You treat a person with a bit of abruptness because you’re being harassed for the 8th time in 10 minutes and they get all huffy and angry because you’re rude. The fear of being bothered also affects how long you’re willing to stop and look at something. And talking to the locals in an honest and open manner is simply impossible when you have to assume everyone who talks to you is about to move onto something of a commercial nature.

All you can do is try to have some fun, as I did near the end of my stay in Chefchouan where they took me to be a new arrival (I’d actually just been checking the next day’s bus schedule) and began telling me how I could witness hashish manufacturing at a real Berber house. I had to explain to the poor guy before he even got started in his broken English that I’d already been to no less than 6 Berber houses, seen truckloads of hashish made and had also spent over 600 euros on carpets. Too bad he hadn’t caught me earlier in the week.