So. The Great Big Adventure has been and gone. But the next one has already been booked! How indulgent. I will hopefully start posting some notes and photos here of my time in the UK and in Morocco, but I wanted to start off with a follow-up to a post I wrote back when I was trying to plan my trip.
To tour or not to tour? I was, at the time, torn about whether to book myself onto an organised tour or to go all boho and do it on my own.
In the end, I wound up doing a little bit of both, and for me, the best choice by far was going with an organised tour. I was travelling on my own at first, and I got very lonely very quickly, and I also started feeling a little overwhelmed. As a woman on my own I was attracting attention from the men. Nothing threatening, nothing I couldn’t ignore, but it still made me uncomfortable.
I also really enjoyed having my transport and accommodation sorted by someone I trusted. Coming out of the train station in Fez, for example, into the rush hour zoo that confronted us would have been immensely stressful without Jamal there to help negotiate taxis. It made such a difference, I can’t even tell you. It also kept me from wasting hours sitting in train and bus stations because I’m paranoid and like to arrive crazy early.
I am also incurably lazy when I have spare time, so it was great to have a schedule, to be kept on the move. I loved the pace we moved at, loved the constant barrage of new sights and sounds and experiences. I really loved having a structure. And I was able to be much more adventurous because of it.
Because Jamal was able to tell us where it was safe to eat, what it was safe to drink, what was good in any particular restaurant, I was much more adventurous with my food choices than I would otherwise have been. And having the rest of the group around encouraged that, too. I probably wouldn’t have eaten the pastilla had I been on my own, and definitely wouldn’t have had the camel burger, but both were incredibly tasty.
So, I am a complete convert to Intrepid Travel. The maximum group size is 12, and on the first half of my trip there were only 8 of us, which was perfect. You never feel like one of those giant bus tours, with 40 people trailing after a guide in uniform waving a folder over her head. We were travellers, as opposed to tourists, they told us, and I really liked that.
The only issue with the tours, however, is that so much depends on the guide you get and on the other people in your group. I was incredibly lucky. Jamal, our guide, was phenomenal. Fun and energetic and funny, and incredibly, incredibly patient. The tour I took was actually two tours sewn together, so while we had the same guide for both parts, the members of the group changed as we switched from one part to the next. As I mentioned, on the first part there were only 8 of us, which was a perfect number. Enough for variety of company but not so many that things got unwieldy. There was a handful of Aussies, two South Africans and myself, and we all got on like a house on fire. We bonded very quickly, and even when we had free time, we elected to do things together. It was more fun that way.
At the changeover, however, we lost two of the Aussies and both South Africans, which was a bit of a blow. And we picked up 8 new people, bringing our group up to the maximum size of 12. While some of the new folks were wonderful, some of them were not good travellers. They were always, always late, they didn’t think, they didn’t listen, they weren’t prepared, and it drove the rest of us up the wall. There was, unfortunately, a lot of tension that came out of this, and not a lot that could be done about it. The trip was still really enjoyable, but the four of us who had come through from the first half kept wishing that our little group had stayed the same for the back half as well.
This is the risk you take, though, whenever you sign up for group travel. And I would rather risk it than not. I mentioned earlier that my next adventure was booked; I’m going to Thailand for two weeks at the end of February to visit my sister who is teaching English there. And I’ve managed to work an Intrepid trip into the time I’m there.
kithika