So much of our time in Morocco was seeing things from the other side. Literally.
On our first full day there, we visited a necropolis in Tangier. This was a burial ground created by the ancient Phoenicians (as in…Hooked on Phonics. Those Phoenicians). These 98 graves were created between 800 BCE to 1000 BCE. After the Roman conquest, the necropolis was plundered and not much was left there. The graves are now open and fill with rainwater.
It was when we were sitting on that cliff, looking across the Straits of Gibraltar (a place I learned to identify on a map and read about in poetry as a middle schooler, but never fully understood as real), that it finally hit me. We were in Africa. That night, I wrote in my journal, “Just being here feels impossible—How can I be here, of all places? Standing over graves carved by the literal inventors of my alphabet? Looking across the water at actual Spain?”
That sense of an entirely new perspective of history and geography never left me the whole time we were in Morocco.
We drove a little further to the place where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet. Hmad had us pose by a sign for a photo—on our right was the ocean separating us from our home. On our left, the sea that stars in the Odyssey. Just right there.
Leaving Tangier, we got our first taste of the Moroccan landscape—rocky and shrubby, steep and dramatic. We also saw our first camels!
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