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The Boy from Fez book
Everyone Has a Fez Why I Wrote The Boy from Fez My new memoir, The Boy from Fez, will be published on October 15, 2026. I have wondered how I should announce it. I could tell you that it is a book about my childhood in Fez, Morocco. I could describe its chapters, its people, its houses and streets. I could tell you about the city in which I was born and the family that raised me. All of that would be true. But it would not tell you why I wrote the book. I wrote The Boy from Fez because I began to understand that when people disappear, entire worlds can disappear with them. Not the great events recorded by historians. Those usually survive. I mean the smaller things. The way a grandmother held a child's hand. The smell coming from a kitchen before noon. The baker who knew every family in the neighborhood. The voice of the water carrier in the street. The sound of a door opening. A proverb repeated so often that nobody remembered who first said it. The particular silence of a house in the afternoon. The rituals around a meal. The songs women sang while working. The way people greeted one another. The stories children heard before they were old enough to understand that one day they would become the custodians of those stories. These things rarely enter history books. Yet perhaps they are the things from which we are made. The Fez I Carry I was born in Fez, one of the world's ancient cities, but The Boy from Fez is not primarily about monuments. The Fez I wanted to preserve was alive. It had voices. It had fragrances. It argued. It laughed. It prayed. It cooked. It traded. It celebrated. It mourned. Its wisdom did not live only in libraries or mosques. It lived in kitchens, workshops, courtyards, markets and conversations. It lived in craftsmen's hands and grandmothers' sayings. It lived among people whose names will never appear in history books but without whom there would have been no history worth remembering. Among them was my grandmother, Mi Lalla. As a little boy, I often experienced Fez while holding her hand. I did not know then that she was teaching me. Children rarely know when they are being formed. We simply walk beside those we love. Only much later do we discover that their voices have somehow become part of our own. I travelled far from that little boy. I crossed countries and continents. I encountered other cultures, languages, religions, landscapes and ways of understanding the world. Yet the farther I travelled, the more I understood something strange: The boy had come with me. Fez had come with me. Everyone Has a Fez But while writing this book, I discovered something I had not expected. Fez does not belong only to me. Everyone has a Fez. Your Fez may not have ancient walls or narrow alleys. It may be your grandmother's kitchen in Sicily. A village in India. A neighborhood in New York that no longer exists. A farmhouse somewhere in Australia. A courtyard in Andalusia. A childhood in Senegal. It may be the smell of bread your mother baked, the tree you climbed as a child, a schoolyard, a song, a father's expression, an old neighbor, a family table around which people once gathered. Sometimes Fez is not even a place. It may simply be the sound of a mother's voice you have not heard for thirty years. We all come from somewhere. And that somewhere continues living within us long after geography has carried us elsewhere. This is why I have not written The Boy from Fez to tell readers that my childhood was more beautiful than theirs, or that the past was better than the present. I have no desire to compete with the present. I wanted only to remember. And perhaps by remembering my Fez, I might awaken yours. I shared my Fez to revive theirs. That, more than anything, became the purpose of this book. A Gift to My Daughter There is also one reader for whom this book carries a different meaning. My daughter, Asia. She was born and raised in America, in another country, another culture and another generation. She knows the man who became her father. But I wanted to leave her a way of meeting the boy who existed before him. I wanted her to know the houses that sheltered him, the grandmother whose hand he held, the parents and family who formed him, the streets he walked, the beliefs he inherited and questioned, the people whose kindness remained with him, the mistakes, laughter, customs, songs and silences from which her father slowly emerged. Not because she must become any of these things. Her life belongs to her. Her identity belongs to her. I ask nothing from her. The Boy from Fez is simply a gift waiting on a shelf. She can open it whenever she wishes. Perhaps I will be sitting beside her when she does. Perhaps I will not. That is one of the reasons we write. A human voice eventually becomes silent. A written voice can wait. Years from now, she may open the book and find a little boy waiting there. And perhaps he will take her hand and say: Come. Let me show you where your father came from. Why We Remember Writing this memoir has taught me that remembrance is not the same as nostalgia. Nostalgia sometimes wants yesterday back. I don't. Yesterday had its hardships, injustices, fears and limitations. I would not exchange the possibilities of today merely to recover the world of my childhood. But neither do I believe that progress requires forgetting. We can walk forward while occasionally turning our heads toward those who helped us reach the road. That is what The Boy from Fez has allowed me to do. I turned around. And there they were. Some had been gone for decades. Yet while I wrote, they returned. Mi Lalla returned. The houses opened their doors. The neighborhood began making noise again. Someone was baking bread. Someone was calling from another room. Someone was telling a story I had almost forgotten. For a few hours each day, through the strange mercy of memory, the vanished became present. Perhaps that is another reason human beings tell stories. Not to defeat death. But to refuse to let love disappear without leaving a trace. An Invitation On October 15, I will send The Boy from Fez into the world. After that, the book no longer belongs entirely to me. Every reader will bring something to it that I could never have written. His grandmother. Her father. Their childhood. Their street. Their kitchen. Their losses. Their laughter. Their Fez. And perhaps somewhere, someone will close the book one evening and suddenly remember something that has not visited them for fifty years. A face. A fragrance. A voice. A hand. If that happens, then the little boy from Fez will have accomplished what I hoped he might. I shared my Fez so that you might remember yours. Everyone has a Fez. Where is yours?
How Morocco became a Destination
From Traveller to Tourist: How Morocco Became a Destination Travel existed long before tourism. Morocco knew the traveller centuries before anyone thought of packaging Marrakech, Fez, Meknes and Rabat into an itinerary. The traveller was a familiar figure. He might have been a merchant crossing the Sahara, a scholar travelling from one centre of learning to another, a pilgrim beginning the long journey eastward toward Mecca, a diplomat carrying a message from a sultan, a craftsman seeking work, an exile escaping persecution, an explorer driven by curiosity—or even a spy gathering information for a foreign ruler. People travelled because they had somewhere to go, something to seek, something to exchange, something to learn, or sometimes something from which to escape. The journey was rarely the product. It was the road toward something else. Perhaps no Moroccan embodies this older meaning of travel better than Ibn Battuta. When he left Tangier in 1325, at about the age of twenty-one, he was not a tourist departing on an organised journey. He was setting out on pilgrimage. Yet that first intention carried him into one of history's most extraordinary journeys. For centuries, Moroccans moved through a world connected by pilgrimage, scholarship, diplomacy, commerce and migration. Fez communicated intellectually with centres far beyond Morocco. Caravans travelled south across the Sahara. Mediterranean ports opened toward Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Pilgrims moved eastward toward the holy cities. Morocco was never isolated. It was already a country of travellers. What changed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not the discovery of travel. Something subtler happened. Morocco itself became the reason for travelling. When Morocco Entered the European Imagination Before Morocco became a tourism destination, it became an imagined destination. European diplomats, military officers, writers, painters, adventurers and explorers had been coming for centuries. But during the nineteenth century, Morocco increasingly occupied a particular place in the European imagination. It offered proximity and difference at the same time. Europe was only across the Strait of Gibraltar, yet Morocco seemed to many European visitors to belong to another world. Its medinas, souks, clothing, architecture, horses, ceremonies, landscapes, light and public life fascinated painters and writers searching for subjects different from industrialising Europe. Eugène Delacroix's journey to Morocco in 1832 became particularly influential. Later came other artists associated in different ways with the European fascination for Morocco: Benjamin-Constant, Henri Matisse, Hilda Rix Nicholas and many others. Tangier became one of the great doors through which this encounter took place. For the painter, Morocco offered colour. For the writer, mystery. For the adventurer, the unknown. For European society increasingly fascinated with what it called the Orient, Morocco offered exoticism remarkably close to home. But we should be careful when looking backward. These visitors did not all see the same Morocco, nor did they arrive with the same intentions. Some approached the country with genuine curiosity and admiration. Others inevitably carried the prejudices and hierarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. The intellectual climate of the period often divided humanity into categories such as civilized and primitive, advanced and backward, modern and traditional. Orientalism could produce extraordinary art and scholarship, but it could also turn living societies into objects to be observed, classified and romanticized. And colonialism added another dimension. Europe no longer merely wanted to encounter other worlds. Increasingly, it believed it had the authority to reorganise them. Travel, scholarship, commerce, military expansion and colonial ambition sometimes walked disturbingly close together. Morocco stood at the intersection of all of them. Tangier: The Door Tangier occupied a special place. Geography had already decided much of its destiny. Standing at the entrance to the Mediterranean and looking toward Europe across one of the narrowest maritime crossings between the two continents, Tangier had long been diplomatic, commercial, and strategic. By the beginning of the twentieth century, its international character intensified. The arrangements surrounding the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912 left Tangier under a special regime, and in 1923 the Tangier Protocol established the framework for the International Zone. The result was one of the strangest urban experiments of the twentieth century. Diplomats, businessmen, artists, writers, adventurers, expatriates, wealthy visitors and people seeking freedoms unavailable elsewhere all passed through Tangier. It became international before international tourism had acquired its contemporary meaning. Tangier was not simply visited. It was imagined. And imagination is one of tourism's most powerful engines. Before someone purchases a journey, they must first desire a place. Marrakech: The Exotic City If Tangier was the door, Marrakech became one of Morocco's great promises. The ochre walls, palm groves, Atlas Mountains, souks, gardens, storytellers, musicians and great square offered precisely the visual language that early twentieth-century European travellers associated with an exotic Morocco. Yet modern tourism requires more than desire. A destination needs access. It needs transportation. It needs accommodation. It needs information. It needs someone to tell the prospective traveller: Come. This is what you will see. This is where you will stay. This is how you will get there. Under the French Protectorate, these pieces increasingly came together. Hubert Lyautey understood the political and economic value of presenting Morocco to European visitors. Tourism could demonstrate accessibility, order and stability while generating economic activity and strengthening the image of the Protectorate abroad. The gaze of the Orientalist was gradually being joined by something more systematic: destination marketing. Building the Infrastructure of the Tourist The traveller of earlier centuries adapted himself to the road. Modern tourism increasingly adapted the road to the traveller. That distinction matters. Transport companies connected cities. Roads became more reliable. Shipping companies promoted access from Europe. Railway and motor transport expanded. Guidebooks explained what should be seen. Posters created desire. Hotels offered an environment in which affluent European visitors could encounter Morocco while retaining familiar standards of comfort. The creation of the Central Tourism Committee in 1918 signalled that tourism was no longer merely happening spontaneously. It was becoming something to be organised and promoted. The Guides Bleus helped transform a complicated country into something legible to the visitor: routes, monuments, hotels, distances and recommended circuits. Transport networks performed the same function physically. The establishment of CTM in 1919 helped connect Moroccan cities by modern road transport. Maritime companies such as Compagnie de Navigation Paquet connected Morocco with European ports and helped promote the destination visually. Then came the great hotels. La Mamounia opened in Marrakech in 1923. Palais Jamaï in Fez, created from a former palace, became another prestigious address associated with elite travel. These establishments were more than places to sleep. They represented a new compromise between two worlds: the experience of Morocco with the comforts expected by wealthy international travellers. A visitor could spend the afternoon wandering through a medina and return in the evening to an elegant hotel. Morocco was becoming accessible without becoming entirely familiar. That balance, comfort surrounded by difference, would become one of the enduring formulas of international tourism. The Birth of the Imperial Cities The expression “Imperial Cities” did not create the historical importance of Fez, Marrakech, Meknes and Rabat. Each had already served as a seat of Moroccan power under different dynasties and periods of the country's history. What changed during the early Protectorate was the way these cities were presented to the foreign traveller. Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, deeply impressed by Morocco's historic cities, pursued a policy of preserving their old medinas while developing new European quarters alongside them. Within the emerging tourism strategy, these former capitals came to be presented collectively as the Villes Impériales — the Imperial Cities. Early Hachette travel literature, including the Guides Bleus, documented and promoted the circuit, while tourism posters presented it visually to prospective visitors abroad. Roads, motor transport, hotels and guidebooks made it possible to transform four historically distinct capitals into a journey that could be organised, repeated and sold. Moroccan history had created the capitals. Modern tourism turned them into a circuit. That circuit proved remarkably durable. A century later, “The Imperial Cities of Morocco” remains one of the country's best-known itineraries. The Imperial Cities. The expression fascinated me for years. Fez, Marrakech, Meknes and Rabat were unquestionably historic centres of royal power. Each had served as a capital under different periods and dynasties of Moroccan history. But Moroccans did not create these cities as a tourism circuit. History created four capitals. Tourism connected them into one journey. An old French Guide Bleu from the early 1920s that I have kept among my materials presents the Imperial Cities as an organised circuit. I also possess an early tourism poster promoting the Imperial Cities itinerary. These documents are particularly interesting because they show us something happening almost in front of our eyes. A tourism product was being born. Marrakech could represent the exotic south and the great imperial traditions of the Almoravids, Almohads and Saadians. Fez offered the ancient medina, scholarship, craftsmanship and the legacy of the Idrisids and Marinids. Meknes evoked Moulay Ismail and the ambitions of the early Alaouite state. Rabat combined older dynastic monuments with its new position as the administrative capital. Each city possessed its own history. Tourism gave them a shared name. The Imperial Cities of Morocco. Roads connected them. Guidebooks explained them. Hotels accommodated their visitors. Posters romanticised them. Transport companies moved travellers between them. And tour organisers transformed them into a repeatable itinerary. The importance of this innovation is easy to overlook because the itinerary became so familiar. A century later, travellers are still purchasing variations of essentially the same journey. Sarah Tours itself has offered Imperial Cities journeys. The route survived empires, independence, aviation, package tourism, the internet and social media. That tells us something about the extraordinary durability of a well-created travel narrative. The Invention of the Destination This is where we should distinguish carefully between history and tourism. The French did not discover Fez. They did not create Marrakech. They did not give Meknes its imperial history. They did not make Rabat historically important. These cities possessed their civilizations long before modern European tourism existed. What the emerging tourism industry did was something different. It selected. Connected. Named. Interpreted. Promoted. It transformed places into destinations and destinations into itineraries. That process is still at the heart of tourism today. A country contains thousands of places. Tourism chooses which ones the visitor is told to desire. Edith Wharton and the Written Morocco Writers also played an important role in this transformation. Edith Wharton travelled through Morocco in 1917 as the guest of Resident-General Lyautey. Her subsequent book, In Morocco, introduced the country to a substantial English-speaking readership. Her Morocco is fascinating precisely because it sits at the intersection of travel literature, Orientalist fascination and the political environment of the Protectorate. This is why travel writing deserves attention in the history of tourism. Before photographs fill websites and videos circulate instantly around the world, someone must create the Morocco that exists in the imagination of the person who has never been there. Writers did that. Painters did that. Later photographers and poster designers did it. Today Instagram, YouTube and travel websites do it. The technology changed. The principle did not. We travel twice: first in imagination, then in geography. From Exploration to Organisation By the early twentieth century, therefore, many of the essential components of modern Moroccan tourism were appearing together. There was an international image of Morocco. There were gateways. There were transportation networks. There were prestigious hotels. There were guidebooks. There were tourism institutions. There were posters. And increasingly, there were defined itineraries. The traveller was becoming a tourist. This did not mean curiosity disappeared. Nor did it mean every visitor suddenly became superficial. It meant that travel could increasingly be purchased as an organised experience. Someone else had selected the route. Someone else had identified the monuments. Someone else had chosen the hotel. Someone else had calculated the time. Someone else had decided what constituted the Morocco worth seeing. The uncertainty of travel was gradually being replaced by the architecture of tourism. Then Another Traveller Appeared But history rarely moves in a straight line. By the 1960s and 1970s, another generation began arriving in Morocco. They were young. They travelled cheaply. They came in Citroën 2CVs, Volkswagen campers, vans, motorcycles, converted buses and those extraordinary overland trucks that fascinated me as a teenager. Many rejected precisely the highly organised tourism their parents' generation had embraced. They wanted the road again. They wanted unpredictability. They wanted contact. They wanted to stay longer and spend less. They wanted to cross borders rather than fly over them. And, once again, Morocco was waiting at Europe's doorstep. I know this generation intimately because it was through them that tourism entered my own life. One morning, when I was still a schoolboy in Fez, I found young European travellers camping near the entrance to our family farm. Later, our farm became informally known among travellers as a place where one could camp. The instructions were apparently simple: “Go there and ask for Hamid.” Then came the overland trucks at Bab Khokha near my high school. Guerba, Sundowners, Insight, Capricorn, Contiki and later Topdeck are among the names I remember from that remarkable period. I stared at those vehicles and dreamed of travelling in them. Eventually, I did. I became a licensed guide in 1974, travelled throughout Morocco and later across Africa, and led journeys that sometimes lasted for months. That generation taught me another meaning of travel. The traveller did not have to stand outside a culture and look at it. He could walk inside it. Anthropology Before Anthropology Years later, I formally studied anthropology. But the road had already begun my education. Travelling slowly taught me to listen. Camping taught me that comfort and richness of experience are not the same thing. Crossing borders taught me that cultures appear much simpler from a distance than they do when you live among people. Guiding taught me something else. I did not enjoy standing in front of travellers and asking them to follow me. I preferred walking beside them. Eventually I understood why. I wasn't showing them Morocco. I was sharing my culture with them. That distinction would eventually become central to my philosophy of travel. When Tourism Became an Industry The decades that followed transformed tourism again. Commercial aviation made distant destinations accessible to millions. Package tours reduced uncertainty. Large hotels expanded. International brands arrived. Cruise ships grew. Online booking changed distribution. Review platforms changed reputation. Low-cost airlines changed geography. And finally smartphones changed the traveller's relationship with the unknown. Tourism became one of the world's great industries. This brought enormous benefits. Millions of people who could never have undertaken the journeys of Ibn Battuta—or even the overland travellers of the 1970s—could encounter other countries and cultures. Tourism created employment. It supported hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, artisans and countless small businesses. It connected people who otherwise might never have met. But scale also introduced dangers. Places could become products. Cultures could become performances. Hospitality could become transactions. Communities could receive visitors without receiving a fair share of tourism's benefits. Nature could become scenery to be consumed. And the traveller could return home with thousands of photographs without ever truly encountering the place photographed. The tourist had conquered distance. But sometimes distance remained between people. Can the Tourist Become a Traveller Again? This, for me, is the question facing tourism today. I do not believe we should romanticise the past. The old roads were uncomfortable. Travel could be dangerous. Information was scarce. Many people simply could not afford to travel. Modern tourism has democratised experiences that were once available only to aristocrats, adventurers or people willing to endure considerable hardship. I do not want to return to 1923. Nor do I want to recreate 1973. I want to preserve something both periods can teach us. Curiosity. The willingness to encounter rather than merely consume. The humility to enter another person's country as a guest. The patience to listen before judging. The understanding that the people serving our meal, driving our vehicle, weaving our carpet or opening their village to us are not part of the scenery. They are our hosts. And they have as much right to benefit from the journey as we do. From Tourist to Guest Perhaps, then, the next evolution of tourism is not technological. Perhaps it is human. We began with the traveller. We created the tourist. Perhaps now we need to rediscover the guest. A guest arrives with curiosity but also respect. A guest understands that hospitality creates obligations on both sides. A guest does not ask merely: What can I take from this place? but also: What relationship am I entering by being here? That is where responsible and sustainable travel begin for me. Not with slogans. With relationships. The traveller should benefit. The guide should benefit. The driver should benefit. The hotel and restaurant should benefit. The artisan and farmer should benefit. The local community should benefit. The natural environment should not pay the price for everybody else's profit. And the culture should remain more than a performance staged for outsiders. Travel succeeds when the encounter leaves both host and guest richer. A Century After the Imperial Cities There is something wonderfully circular about this story. A century ago, an early traveller could open a Guide Bleu, discover the Imperial Cities and set out toward Marrakech, Rabat, Meknes and Fez. Today, someone can open a telephone thousands of kilometres away and book essentially the same route in minutes. The roads are better. The hotels are more comfortable. The vehicles are faster. The information is almost limitless. But the fundamental question has not changed: Why are you travelling? If the answer is simply to collect places, tourism can provide them efficiently. But if the answer is to understand something beyond ourselves, then we must recover some of the spirit of the traveller. Morocco has been receiving strangers for centuries. Pilgrims passed through it. Merchants traded in it. Scholars studied in it. Diplomats negotiated in it. Painters imagined it. Colonial administrators reorganised it. Tourists photographed it. Overlanders crossed it. And millions of visitors continue to arrive every year. Each generation invented its own Morocco. But Morocco was always more complicated than the image created for it. Perhaps that is the responsibility of travel today: not merely to see Morocco, but to allow Morocco to reveal itself. That is the kind of travel I still believe in. It is the reason I remained in tourism. It is the reason I created Sarah Tours. And after more than half a century of travelling, guiding, studying and listening, I find myself returning to something I learned almost accidentally as a young man in Fez: The best journey is not one in which the guide walks ahead and the tourist follows behind. It is one in which we walk beside one another. Perhaps tourism does not need another invention. Perhaps it simply needs to remember the traveller from whom it came.
Golden Age of Overland Travel
The Almost-Vanished Golden Age of Overland Travel How a teenager in Fez discovered travel, anthropology, and a philosophy that would eventually become Sarah Tours Sometimes we choose our profession. Sometimes our profession chooses us. Tourism entered my life almost by accident, long before I imagined that one day I would create Sarah Tours, travel across continents, study anthropology, or spend a lifetime thinking about what it really means to travel. I was still a teenager in high school in Fez. One morning, I woke up and prepared to go to school as usual. When I stepped outside, I discovered two cars camped near the entrance to our family farm. One was a beautiful Citroën DS carrying a well-off young French couple—what we would then have called hippies. The other was the unmistakable little Citroën 2CV, with two young men travelling in it. They had simply arrived. There was no reservation. No reception desk. No online review telling them where to stay. They were travellers. We welcomed them. That encounter became a friendship that lasted for years. I did not know it that morning, but travel had just knocked on my door. When Our Farm Became a Campground This was the late 1960s and early 1970s, an extraordinary period in independent travel. Young Europeans were crossing borders in cars, vans, campervans, trailers, old buses, and whatever vehicles could survive the journey. Volkswagen campers seemed to be everywhere. Travel was slower then. Perhaps because it was slower, encounters lasted longer. Somehow, word began to circulate among young travellers passing through Fez that there was a farm near Ben Tato where they could camp. The directions were wonderfully simple: “Go there and ask for Hamid. He is a generous young guy.” And so our farm gradually became an unofficial free campground. Nobody designed it as a tourism project. There was no business plan. There was simply space, hospitality, curiosity, and the pleasure of meeting people who had travelled from places I knew mostly from maps and books. They wanted to know Morocco. I wanted to know the world. We met somewhere in between. From Practising Languages to Becoming a Guide Then another coincidence occurred. At a surprise party, I met an old acquaintance from my neighbourhood who had become a student guide. He began encouraging me to accompany visitors through the Medina of Fez. At first, my motivation was simple: I wanted to practice my French and improve my English. Then I discovered I could also earn a little pocket money. More importantly, I discovered that I enjoyed it. My high-school teachers soon learned that I was good at showing people around Fez. When relatives or friends came from France to visit them, they would sometimes ask me to take their guests through the city. I knew history well. But I also knew Fez in another way. I knew its streets. I knew its neighbourhoods. I knew its people. I knew which alley led where, who worked behind which door, how people spoke to one another, where craftsmen gathered, and how the city changed from one hour of the day to another. I knew Fez, as we say, like my pocket. Without realizing it, I was learning one of the first lessons of guiding: Knowing facts about a place is not the same as knowing the place. The Strange Trucks at Bab Khokha Then something appeared that fascinated me. Near my high school, Moulay Rachid, there was a parking area at Bab Khokha. Beginning around the early 1970s, I started noticing unusual vehicles arriving there. They were high off the ground, rugged, almost military-looking trucks. They came mainly from Britain and northern Europe, carrying small groups of perhaps fifteen to twenty-five young travellers. These were not the conventional tourists arriving in air-conditioned coaches and staying in luxury hotels. These people were crossing countries. Sometimes continents. Some of the overland routes of that era stretched from Britain through Europe, North Africa and Asia, and eventually toward Australia and New Zealand. I would stand near those trucks and stare at them. And I dreamed. One day, I thought, I am going to travel in one of those vehicles. At first, I became acquainted with two Moroccan guides who worked with these groups, Ghali and Aziz. They encouraged me. “Learn English,” they told me. “When several trucks arrive at the same time, come and help us.” So I did. I remember names from that remarkable overland era—Guerba, Sundowners, Insight, Capricorn, Contiki, and later Topdeck, among others. Some were British, some Australian, and perhaps some American. At the time, I was less interested in where the companies were registered than in those extraordinary trucks arriving at Bab Khokha carrying young travellers who seemed to have crossed half the world. These companies were part of a very different tourism culture. You carried your life with you. You camped. You cooked. You crossed borders. You broke down. You repaired things. You got lost. You met people. And somehow the difficulties became part of the journey. 1974: Becoming a Guide In 1974, I passed the examination of the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism and became an officially licensed local guide in Fez. I had found my world. Most guides naturally preferred conventional tourism: luxury hotels and organised coach groups arriving from France, Spain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere. There was nothing wrong with that kind of travel. It simply wasn't me. I loved camping. I loved walking. I loved mountains. I loved sitting around a fire. I loved the informality of the young overland travellers. Their clothes were casual. Their expectations were different. They were curious, adventurous and usually willing to accept a little discomfort in exchange for discovery. Perhaps because I felt comfortable with them, they felt comfortable with me. Soon I was no longer merely guiding them through Fez. They began asking me to travel with them throughout Morocco. The teenage boy who had once stood at Bab Khokha staring at those enormous trucks was suddenly riding in them. I Wasn't Showing Them Morocco This period taught me something that has remained with me throughout my life. I never felt that I was showing Morocco to tourists. That language never felt right. I was sharing my culture with fellow travellers. There is a difference. If I stand in front of you and lecture, I am the guide and you are the tourist. But if we walk together, something else happens. You ask questions. I ask questions. You discover my country. I discover something about yours. We eat together. We become tired together. We laugh. Sometimes we disagree. Sometimes the vehicle breaks down and everyone has to help. The distinction between host and guest begins to soften. That was the kind of travel I loved. I wanted travellers beside me, not behind me. I did not know the academic vocabulary for any of this yet. I had not studied anthropology. But I was already practising it. Anthropology Before University Eventually I worked extensively with Capricorn and travelled far beyond Morocco. North Africa opened into the rest of the continent. Journeys that began as two-week adventures became expeditions lasting months. Some tours extended as long as thirty-two weeks. Imagine what happens when you travel with people for thirty-two weeks. You don't simply visit countries. You live together. You encounter borders, languages, food, illness, generosity, misunderstandings, landscapes, villages, cities, celebrations and unexpected acts of kindness. Every day becomes fieldwork. Every meal becomes cultural exchange. Every roadside stop becomes an anthropology lesson. Years later, I returned to university and formally studied anthropology. But in some ways the road had reached the classroom before I did. Overland travel taught me anthropology before I knew to call it anthropology. The university gave me theories and methods for understanding experiences I had already been living for years. Sarah Tours Time passed. I travelled. I studied. Eventually I earned my PhD. Yet something inside me remained unsettled. The road kept calling. In 1994, I finally answered it by creating my own company in Alexandria, Virginia. I called it Sarah Tours, after my wife and my daughter, who both carry the name Sarah. But although the company was new, its philosophy was already decades old. It had begun at our farm outside Fez. It had grown in the narrow streets of the Medina. It had climbed aboard those strange overland trucks parked at Bab Khokha. And it had travelled with me across Africa. Overland journeys, hiking, trekking in the Atlas Mountains, Sahara expeditions, camping, discovery and active travel naturally became Sarah Tours specialties. That was where I found my energy. That was where I felt alive. What Travel Used to Mean I was fortunate to experience an era when travel still contained a large element of uncertainty. We did not always know exactly where we would sleep. We could not consult a smartphone before entering a village. There were no online ratings telling us whether an encounter was worth having. We travelled to discover. Of course, tourism has changed enormously since then, and many of those changes have made travel safer, more accessible and more comfortable. But something valuable can also be lost when travel becomes merely another commodity. When every encounter is packaged, every minute scheduled, every experience priced and every destination reduced to something to consume, we risk forgetting why human beings travelled in the first place. ![] Travel can be a business. Sarah Tours is a business. Guides, drivers, hotels, cooks, artisans and suppliers deserve to earn a dignified living from their work. But travel should never become only a business. There must remain curiosity. Respect. Fairness. Wonder. Human encounter. Responsibility toward the places we visit. And enough humility to remember that when we enter another person's country, village or home, we are guests before we are customers. Call Me Old-Fashioned Perhaps I am old-fashioned. If so, I accept it gladly. I want to preserve something of the spirit of travel that first found me in the narrow streets of Fez. Not the discomfort for its own sake. Not nostalgia for old trucks or broken roads. The spirit. The willingness to discover. The willingness to walk. The willingness to listen. The willingness to accept that the person we meet along the road may be as important as the monument we travelled thousands of kilometres to see. That spirit has guided my life. And as long as I remain involved with Sarah Tours, I want it to guide the company. I hope Sarah Tours will outlive me. Perhaps someday another young guide will inherit something from what we have learned. Perhaps another traveller will discover that the purpose of crossing a border is not simply to arrive somewhere else, but to understand another human being a little better. If that happens, then the legacy will have been worthwhile. I entered tourism almost accidentally as a teenager. More than half a century later, I realise that tourism did not merely give me a profession. Travel educated me. It introduced me to anthropology. It introduced me to the world. And, strangely enough, the farther it carried me from Fez, the more deeply it taught me to understand where I came from. So call me old-fashioned. I will continue travelling this way for as long as I can. And I will continue believing that the best journey is not one in which a guide walks ahead and tourists follow behind. The best journey is the one in which we walk beside one another. Long live responsible travel. Long live sustainable travel. Long live ethical travel. And above all, long live the simple human curiosity that makes us leave home, cross a border, meet a stranger, and return understanding our shared world a little better.
Morocco Development
Morocco Today — Part One A Country Turning Inheritance into Possibility Twelve centuries of Moroccan statehood. These three horizons, history, friendship, and possibility, help tell the story of Morocco today: a country deeply rooted in its inheritance, yet confident enough to reinvent itself. Under the leadership of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, history is not merely where Morocco rests. It is where Morocco begins. For the traveler, Morocco is often first encountered through its ancient medinas, imperial cities, sacred landscapes, music, craftsmanship, hospitality, and living traditions. These are among the country’s greatest treasures, and they remain essential to understanding its soul. But Morocco cannot be understood only through its past. Beyond the walls of Fez, the palaces of Rabat, the souks of Marrakech, and the kasbahs of the south, another Morocco is taking shape: industrial, technological, environmentally ambitious, and increasingly connected to Africa and the wider world. It is a Morocco attempting to transform potential into value, and value into shared progress. From History to Industry The figures matter, but only because they reveal the direction in which the country is moving. The 2025 Africa Industrialization Index, published by the African Development Bank in 2026, placed Morocco at the forefront of industrial development in Africa. The index evaluates countries across manufacturing performance, infrastructure, investment, labor, economic stability, and the environment in which industries can grow. This achievement did not appear overnight. It is the result of years of investment in infrastructure, education, ports, logistics, industrial ecosystems, international partnerships, and a deliberate effort to connect Moroccan production with global supply chains. The transformation is especially visible in the automotive industry. Morocco has become one of Africa’s principal automobile manufacturing and export centers, with production capacity approaching one million vehicles annually. Around factories in Tangier, Kenitra, and other industrial zones, entire ecosystems of suppliers, engineers, technicians, logistics companies, and training institutions have emerged. The aerospace sector has followed a similar path. Morocco now hosts around 150 aerospace companies, producing components and providing specialized services for major international manufacturers. Plans to deepen the sector include work connected with next-generation aircraft engines, cabin equipment, and landing-gear manufacturing. But numbers alone do not tell the full story. Behind every vehicle assembled, every aircraft component manufactured, and every container shipped is a human life: A worker acquiring new skills. An engineer developing expertise. A family gaining greater security. A young Moroccan beginning to imagine a future without having to leave home. Industry becomes meaningful when national progress enters the household. Preparing for the Industries of Tomorrow Morocco’s ambition is not limited to existing industries. The country is also investing in the production chains of the future, including electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy, digital infrastructure, green hydrogen, and other technologies that will shape the coming decades. The development of an integrated battery industry is particularly significant. A country that manufactures automobiles must also prepare for the transition from combustion engines to electric mobility. By attracting investment in battery materials and production, Morocco is seeking not merely to participate in technological change, but to anticipate it. This is an important distinction. A country can wait for the future to arrive and then attempt to adapt. Or it can prepare its people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries before the transformation is complete. Morocco is attempting the second path. Confronting Water Scarcity Industrial development cannot be separated from the environmental realities facing the country. Morocco is already experiencing the effects of climate change through prolonged drought, declining rainfall, pressure on groundwater, and increasing water scarcity. The response has included a substantial expansion of desalination capacity, alongside investment in water conservation, wastewater reuse, more efficient irrigation, and the gradual improvement of national water infrastructure. Desalination is not a complete answer. It requires energy, investment, careful environmental management, and equitable distribution. But for a water-stressed country with long Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines, it has become an increasingly important part of national resilience. The challenge is not simply to produce more water. It is to develop a wiser relationship with water. Agriculture, tourism, urban development, industry, and household consumption must all become part of the same national conversation. Progress cannot be measured only by what Morocco builds, but also by how carefully it protects the natural resources upon which that progress depends. Energy from the Sun and Wind Morocco has also become widely recognized for its investments in renewable energy. Solar complexes, wind farms, hydropower installations, and emerging projects in green hydrogen and green ammonia are helping the country reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels and prepare for a lower-carbon future. The national objective is for renewable sources to represent 52 percent of installed electricity capacity by 2030. This ambition is both environmental and economic. Clean energy can help reduce emissions, strengthen energy security, support new industries, and make Moroccan products more competitive in markets that are increasingly concerned with the carbon footprint of production. Here again, the meaning extends beyond infrastructure. A solar complex is not merely a field of mirrors. A wind farm is not merely a row of turbines. They are signs of a country trying to reconcile development with responsibility. That reconciliation will not always be easy. Renewable-energy projects must respect landscapes, biodiversity, communities, and local livelihoods. Green development should not repeat the mistakes of older forms of development by ignoring the people who live closest to the land. Sustainability is not achieved simply because a project is called green. It is achieved when environmental responsibility, economic value, and human dignity are protected together. From Phosphate to Knowledge Morocco possesses most of the world’s known phosphate reserves. For many countries, the possession of such a resource might encourage a simple economic model: extract it, export it, and depend upon it. Morocco has increasingly sought a different path. The greater value lies not only in the mineral itself, but in the knowledge added to it: fertilizer research, soil analysis, precision agriculture, customized products, farmer education, and solutions adapted to the needs of different crops and environments. This represents a larger national principle: Morocco must not merely export resources. It must create value. Through OCP and its agricultural programs, Morocco has expanded its engagement with farmers across Africa, linking fertilizer production with soil knowledge, agricultural training, and food-security initiatives. This African dimension is essential. Morocco’s progress should not be understood only as a national achievement. Its geography, history, and future place it within a continent where population growth, climate change, food security, employment, and industrialization will shape the lives of generations to come. The most meaningful form of leadership is not the ability to rise alone. It is the ability to create pathways through which others can rise as well. Ports as Bridges The story of Morocco’s transformation can also be seen at Tanger Med. Situated near the Strait of Gibraltar, the port has developed into one of the world’s significant logistics hubs. It connects Morocco with more than 180 ports and, in recent years, has handled more than ten million containers annually. Yet Tanger Med is more than a port. It is a bridge between Africa and Europe, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, national industry and international markets. Around it has grown a much larger industrial and logistical ecosystem. Vehicles, textiles, food products, aerospace components, and other Moroccan goods can move from factory to international market with increasing efficiency. Further east, the development of Nador West Med is expected to add a new port, energy, logistics, and industrial capacity to the Mediterranean coast. These ports reveal something important about Morocco’s contemporary vision. Geography alone does not create opportunity. Geography must be understood, connected, and served by infrastructure. Morocco has always stood at a crossroads. What is changing today is its ability to convert that crossroads into productive relationships. What Do These Achievements Mean for the Traveler? A traveler may reasonably ask: What do automobile factories, renewable-energy projects, fertilizer research, desalination plants, and container ports have to do with visiting Morocco? They have everything to do with understanding the country one is visiting. Travel should not freeze a destination in the past. Morocco is not a historical stage created for the visitor’s pleasure. It is a living country whose people are working, studying, inventing, building, questioning, and preparing for the future. To admire an ancient medina while ignoring the aspirations of the young people who live beyond its walls is to see only half of Morocco. To photograph a traditional artisan while remaining indifferent to whether that artisan can earn a dignified living is to mistake appearance for understanding. To praise the desert while ignoring water scarcity is to admire the landscape without listening to what it is telling us. At Sarah Tours, we believe meaningful travel must bring the visitor into contact with both inheritance and change. The Morocco of the past gives the country its depth. The Morocco being built today gives it movement. And the relationship between the two gives it meaning. Progress Must Be Shared Industrialization, infrastructure, technology, and energy are not ends in themselves. Their value must ultimately be judged by the human lives they improve. Do they create dignified employment? Do they open opportunities for women and young people? Do they strengthen rural communities rather than emptying them? Do they protect water, soil, landscapes, and biodiversity? Do they allow artisans, farmers, small suppliers, and local enterprises to participate in national progress? Do they reduce inequality between regions? Do they deepen cooperation with Africa and with international partners such as Australia? These questions are not criticisms of progress. They are what give progress its moral direction. Morocco’s greatest opportunity is not merely to become more industrial, more connected, or more technologically advanced. It is to demonstrate that modernization can remain faithful to culture, that economic development can respect human dignity, and that national ambition can be joined to environmental responsibility. The task is not complete. No serious national transformation ever is. There remain difficulties, inequalities, environmental pressures, and legitimate questions about how the benefits of development are distributed. But Morocco today is no longer waiting for others to define its possibilities. It is building, experimenting, investing, learning, and looking forward. Twelve centuries of statehood have given Morocco roots. Morocco’s history is long. But its future has already begun.
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