By Wilson Sherwin

My mother infected me early on with a serious case of the “travel bug,” as she calls it. That uneasy, sometimes anxious addiction to packing your bags with a handful of necessities, navigating winding unknown streets, tasting curious foods, feeling the clumsy excitement of new words, in a new language, roll around a mouth which never felt so unwieldy. It has long been a unifying passion of ours: we read travel guides with the same lustful eye other women ogle Vogue’s spring fashion edition. We constantly update the travel wish lists we keep in our journals and call home from payphones across the globe to share stories with each other. For all our mutual travel jones, we had traveled together surprisingly little in the past 10 years. When the opportunity arose to travel to Morocco, that seemingly mystical intersection of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, which had been at the top of our lists for ages, we packed our small suitcases with clothes and giant empty duffel bags for carting home treasures, faster than you could say “open sesame.”

Maybe it was my mother’s part-time Third World childhood, or my living for the past three years in Harlem’s African diasporic hub — whatever the reason — we seemed to share none of the apprehension about traveling as two blue-eyed women to Morocco voiced nervously before our journey by so many of our neighbors, friends, colleagues. Despite (or perhaps because of) our notable closeness, (yes, we have that new breed of mother-daughter relationship The New York Times recently reported on: we speak on the phone at least three times a day, and keep no secrets) we were far more concerned with surviving the first three weeks spent entirely, exclusively, together since before I was in kindergarten, than anything we might encounter abroad. Have you ever seen a real, no-holds-bar, blow-out fight between a mother and daughter? Trust me, it defines terror.

Morocco turned out to be one of the most remarkable, if not ideal places for a mother-daughter adventure we could have ever dreamed up. The very nature of Moroccan society, however hybridized and modernized it has become, remains enormously gender segregated. Women don’t frequent the large Parisian-style cafés which line the sides of city boulevards with rows of tables and chairs; they don’t gather in squares at night in large groups the way men do. For the most part, women don’t work in stores or restaurants in the Medinas. This limited, and very much segregated presence of women in public spaces was at first somewhat unnerving to us, but we quickly realized the benefits separation creates as well. One of which was a noticeable closeness, physical and otherwise, among women we rarely witnessed back home, past a certain age. In Morocco, grown women walk down the street with arms linked, deep in conversation, interacting little with the men around them. In fact, same-sex hand holding is so common that as we were waiting in departure line at the Casablanca airport, we saw two middle-aged male police officers strolling through the terminal holding hands. We both quickly agreed that being in Morocco with a female travel companion felt like a much more natural way to visit the country and interact with locals than with say, a husband or boyfriend, with whom typical “Western” affection of handholding or even kissing in public would have felt clumsy, and often inappropriate.

So we held hands. More than perhaps since I was a child, taking turns guiding each other through crushingly crowded, thick-smelling 14th-century Medina streets, which moved more like rivers than any street I have known. Held hands on an overnight camel trek into the northern reaches of the Sahara Desert, as we lay on our backs under brilliant stars and buried our bare feet in the still warm burnt-orange dessert sand.

Over what must have been gallons of heavenly mint tea, served in tiny Medina shops, we perfected our good cop, bad cop routine; one of us engaging in the necessary rigorous bargaining session required for any purchase, no matter how small, while the other played (or in most cases really was) exhausted or disinterested. We bought dozens of colorful woven scarves, leather slippers, and, of course, more rugs than we knew what to do with, ornately engraved silver and amber jewelry and even a magical lantern or two.

We alternated waking to marvel at the 4 a.m. call to prayer each morning; leaning over windows and balconies in our various hotels to observe the deep growling hum of prayer sweep across each city and town we visited in the pre-dawn light. Both of us filled page after page in our journals over a morning reminder of Morocco’s colonial past, dark coffee and buttery croissants. We sat beneath giant, hundred-year-old palm trees, in the slowly subsiding desert heat each night for exquisite multiple-course, dinners that lasted hours. In between plates of delicious, heavily spiced vegitarian appetizers, fish tagines, fluffy handmade heaps of cous cous, we also found plenty of time to talk, and talking is sure something we can do.

One of the most remarkable aspects of traveling with a parent is the ability to consistently discover completely new dimensions of one another. Morocco gently spread out before us in its hurried crowds and colorful fabrics a remarkable reminder that the people and places you think you know so well will constantly surprise and astound you, while the places you never expect to feel at home will resound in your heart quicker than you ever imagined.

Wilson Sherwin is a freelancer who lives in Harlem and is anxiously awaiting
her next adventure.

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