I’m going to Morocco in November. Such utterances used to impart information but, since the Covid-19 pandemic started two years ago, they have acquired a different slant, prompting wistfulness and teeth-grinding determination. A bombastic “I shall go to Morocco” jostles with a cringing, “Please tell me I’ll get to go this time.”
I was meant to go in February but the trip was cancelled because Morocco closed its borders to UK citizens. That’s changed now, although it remains to be seen how I’ll get to Marrakesh from Scotland in November. The cheap flights that used to abound have evaporated. I don’t care. I’m going.
Every day, I pore over the website of Café Tissardmine, the guesthouse near the Erg Chebbi sand dunes in the Moroccan Sahara where I’m supposed to be staying — inshallah. There are pictures of camel trains atop dunes silhouetted against the sunset, Berber tents floored with colourful kilims and dung-coloured buildings with blue-painted window reveals. I imagine myself sitting on the shaded terrace, drinking sweetened mint tea, and gazing out on the stretching desert and the palm trees around the oasis. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that I will ever be there.
That feeling of impossibility takes me back to my post-university days when I went to teach English in China for a year. It was 1987. I don’t believe I had ever met anyone who had been to China — other than the man who co-ordinated the programme under whose auspices I would be dispatched to the Tianjin Institute of Light Industry with no teaching experience and a few sloppy words of Mandarin.
I looked Tianjin up on the map after accepting the post. I knew nothing about the geography of the People’s Republic of China. When I informed my parents of my plans, they looked at me in sheer terror, as if I’d just told them that I planned to climb Everest solo, then abseil back down.
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Visas arrived with letters of engagement from the college in Tianjin. Flight tickets were ordered on my behalf by the Chinese authorities. My cock-eyed plan became concrete but China was a place so exotic, faraway and unknown that I struggled to conceptualise being there, even when I was sitting in the departure lounge at Gatwick airport.
It wasn’t until I was on the CAAC airlines flight to Beijing that I understood what I had done and how far away I was going. I was the only westerner on the flight and seemed to be the only person willing to observe the fasten-seatbelt signs and to remain seated after take-off. All around me people were getting up and opening the overhead lockers, even as the engines roared and the aircraft ascended at a steep angle. The cabin crew soon sorted them out, though, shoving them back into their seats and forcibly refastening their seatbelts. The world’s favourite airline CAAC was not.
When the flight arrived in Beijing, I was fumigated without so much as a by-your-leave at passport control in case I had Aids. Mr Li from the Tianjin Institute of Light Industry was waiting for me in arrivals. We set off for Tianjin in a kind of minivan with a couple of his colleagues. Before long, we had to stop because of a car crash. From the van window I saw three men in Mao-style suits lying on the road with blood pouring from their mouths. “Ha, ha!” Mr Li exclaimed. “They are dead.”
That was my introduction to the intricate web of cultural differences that would separate me from my hosts. With time, I learnt that people in the PRC often laugh when things are difficult or tense. It doesn’t mean they think a situation is funny.
Unless you accept a diplomatic service posting to North Korea, as a friend of mine did a few years back, learning that he would be spied on even in the toilet, it’s hard to imagine experiencing that degree of culture shock in the 21st century. Before the pandemic, travel had become routine. I now know loads of people who’ve holidayed in China or worked in the Shanghai financial district.
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When I last visited Morocco ten years ago, I flew to Marrakesh for something like £50 return from Edinburgh. Inside the airport there were a couple of stag and hen parties bouncing off the walls at passport control. I watched them stumble off towards the Red City with some alarm, wondering if once-exotic destinations had perhaps become too easy to reach.
The pandemic knocked that on the head. There was a time in summer 2020 when my idea of travel was hiking 20 minutes to a sheltered spot on the coast near our house to picnic with neighbours. I long to see Morocco again and shall be gutted if I don’t get to go. But revisiting a place where travel is unfamiliar and precious has been joyous too.
Restrictions are now easing, but the climate crisis means travel may never be commonplace again. Might that be for the best?
Shop local to go global
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