A NEWSLETTER FOR THE PURPOSEFUL TRAVELER, WHERE THE JOURNEY WITHIN MEETS THE JOURNEY WITHOUT.
Happiness Essential: Faith Edition
The first time I went to Morocco, it was with a group of friends for someone's birthday party. At the end of our time in Marrakesh, I wanted to do a four-day desert journey on a camel. Everyone else flew home. I stayed on and went alone.
It was a few hours’ drive into a remote area outside Marrakesh to reach the place where I was meeting my guide, Mohammed. He was supposedly an English-speaking guide. Though I soon realized that my broken French was about as good as his supposed English.
Yet, off we went.
As I walked into a sea of beige, with Mohammed, a camel, and sand as far as I could see, all I could think was this was either going to be the greatest adventure or the dumbest thing I had ever done. Gratefully, it turned out to be the first. Mohammed was a gentleman. We communicated using whatever limited vocabulary we both had, a French-English dictionary, and a lot of hand signals.
What I loved most was sleeping outside under the stars instead of inside a tent. Mohammed kept a fire going all night. He slept on one side. I slept on the other. In the morning, before setting out for the day, I would tilt my head forward toward him, and he would wrap it in a scarf to protect my face from the sun and the sand.
I trusted a man I had just met, in a place I could not have found my way out of on my own.
That is a different kind of Faith than the one I wrote about last time. Trusting a pilot you never meet is trusting a system built to work. Trusting Mohammed was trusting a person, with no system behind him, just my own read of him in the moment we met.
I often think about that walk into the desert when I hear someone cancel a trip over what is happening in a country they have never been to because they heard it was unsafe. A certain degree of caution is of course worth having. I suggest looking closely at what is actually being warned about before going somewhere deemed dangerous or unsafe. A lot of travel warnings point to one specific city or border, not an entire country. Find out exactly where danger exists, rather than reacting to an entire country. That is what will help keep you safe and still willing to venture out into the world.
I live in Los Angeles, and the number of times I have gotten calls from family and friends thinking that all of Los Angeles was devastated by an earthquake or in an uproar over a riot. It is not the entire city. It is pockets of the city. The same is often true when you are considering another country.
I still think about that scarf, wrapped around my head every morning by a man I never fully understood, in a language neither of us really spoke. It was my Faith, proved out by my guide's thoughtful actions, that showed me a great adventure instead of being the dumbest thing I could have ever done.
