A Morning to Remember – Tangier, Morocco

In 2008 Lindsay and I found ourselves in the beautiful North African country of Morocco. We had just visited Casablanca and Marrakesh and were anxious to explore the third city on our list…Tangier. This incredible city has always intrigued us with its white washed homes, old Medina (old town), shoreline, mysterious history, and we just couldn't resist. We took a night train from Marrakesh and woke up just in time to watch the beautiful shoreline of Northern Morocco pass by the train window. We pulled into the new Tangier station which is a few miles from the center of town. After stepping off the train we heard an American women screaming things like…”get away from me”, etc. It turns out she had fallen between the platform and the train and was getting extremely frustrated as the local men were trying to help her out. To this day we have never seen anybody having such a bad travel experience. Anyway, we walked straight out of the train station and passed the numerous taxi drivers begging to take us the few miles into the city. This was one of the few places I did not have a guidebook for and we also didn’t have a map. All we had was a memorized “Google Earth” map in our minds. We have found that one of the best ways to explore a place is to “jump right in” and start walking instead of taking a cab. We thought the few miles between the train station and the city was a great opportunity to do this. As we made our way through the numerous and busy neighborhoods of the city we eventually saw the ocean come into view (a good sign as the city center lies right on the shoreline). Our Google Earth memory served us well as we eventually found ourselves right on the main palm tree lined boulevard that lies between the beautiful beach and the shops/restaurants of Tangier. It was still quite early in the morning so we just went out to the beach and chilled for quite a while. We eventually got hungry and worked our way to the old Medina were we found a cute little place selling crepes. We bought two of them and almost died when we took a bite. They were warm crepes filled with fruit, creme, etc. We took the crepes, along with a weird yogurt drink that I bought, and perched ourselves right on the old city walls of Tangier to enjoy our breakfast. Eventually the city woke up and we found ourselves exploring the busy and exotic markets of the old Medina. The alleyways and streets in this part of Tangier are made up of cobblestones and wind up step hills. There are numerous shops selling everything you can imagine and it is a great place to “get lost.” We found one particular park with benches and a fountain and chilled there for about an hour before hitting the streets again. After more exploring we eventually found ourselves in a beautiful section of the city that was high on a hill with very narrow alleyways and beautiful old white buildings with brightly painted colorful doors. The whole area was spectacular and we found a nice few overlooking the Mediterranean/Atlantic Ocean. We sat there for quite a while looking towards Europe. We had been backpacking through “The Muslim World” for the last 3 weeks and it seemed so strange to be heading back to Europe (we were catching a flight that day to Madrid). After running into the same annoying tout 3-4 times we made our way out of the city and caught a taxi to the airport. The driver thought I said “port” instead of “airport” but after much laughing and negotiation we ended up at the right place. Tangier Morocco is one-of-a-kind and we will never forget the experience we had exploring its many layers.