Morocco Travel Tips and Tricks: How to not get swindled by mean Moroccan Berbers and Marrakesh merchants

Going to Morocco? Have some pointers on us!

Morocco is a unique place - it is rich in culture, history, and resources, with strong influences from Islam, France, Spain and their Berber natives in all aspects of Moroccan life. It is country of coexistence with, one with a strong emphasis on the homegrown and the handmade. We saw snow in their mountain caps, but during the day temperatures could still go up to 25C a mere 50km away. It is a coastal country with beautiful views and water. It is a country with rolling fields filled with livestock, rivers, and mountains. It is full of old architecture and new developments. It contains both the vast desert as well as the crowded marketplace. The people speak French,  Arabic, Spanish, English and/or Berber, almost every person we encountered was  trilingual and at the very least, bilingual. 

We were prepped on what to expect from a handful of friends who have traveled there but we were still a bit culture shocked upon our arrival. We didn't have a strict itinerary, we simply wanted to explore the culture at a leisurely pace. It was quite the experience! 

Here are some tips we got from friends and fellow travelers:

Don't look like a tourist 

- We were told not to smile too much or to wear very new clothing. Apparently this really catches the eyes of the locals where they'll immediately size you up as a foreigner. We were a little skeptical of this, but i think that would make you seem less approachable than other tourists if you do this.

I would say I'm normally a pretty polite person. In Morocco, I had to turn that down a bit. 

In Canada, I'm used to sales people offering to help me, but I can just tell them I'm fine and "no, thank you," and that normally suffices. In Marrakesh, your "no's" can have no hesitation and you have to be very brusque and purposeful in your movements.

Pay for a guided tour if necessary with the plethora of tour companies associated with the hotels and riads. But if you ever find yourself at a souk or a new destination and look even slightly lost you will find someone come up to you and offer to show you around. If you let them they will ask you for a hefty "tip" for their toils. Don't let this happen. Have a good street map. Map out your stops on google maps and use your navigation while on airplane mode. 

We went to the tanneries and a man from the co op showed us around which we thought was customary. We bought a rug and a leather bag. At the end when we tried to leave he asked us for a tip for his services. 100 Dh - about $13.50 CAD (about 10 dirhams to $1 CAD). Which is ridiculous. In North America you're normally asked for the payment first and you agree to it before embarking on this grand tour. In Morocco they take you on it then play on your guilt and sympathy to get their payment. If it's your first or second day in Morocco and they know it,they'll probably ask you for even more.

In Morocco you can get delicious three course meals for less than 100 DH - just to put the amount in perspective. 

We also got an awesome hiking tour of the cascades in Ouzoud for 30 DH from a quadrilingual, very educated young man. This was a 4.5hr tour with a hike up and down the second tallest falls in Africa. So this guy asking for 100 DH for 5-10 minute of his time was not going to get it from us. 

food and drink 

- Only drink bottled water. There are a lot of minerals in the water there that your traveler's body is just not used to. A friend told us that if we drank the water, after a week you would start getting kidney pains. Sidi Ali and Bahia are good brands. When you order water at a restaurant it will always be bottled. To be safe you can ask to uncap it yourself to make sure it's sealed. One hotel reviewer said she caught waiters refilling water bottles from the taps and then serving them to customers. Another pair of travelers told us that we shouldn't be eating fresh vegetables because they're not cleaned with bottled water, we thought that was a bit extreme, and we didn't have any issues with the vegetables ourselves. 

You can basically get tagine at any restaurant that serves food in Morocco. With the exception of the tagine at our hotel's buffet, I was not disappointed in the slightest. The figs, the prunes, the apricots. The walnuts, and lamb and goat. All savoury, all comfort food made with love. 

Other things that were great - the cous cous at Naima's. Fluffy and full of veggies. Pastillas - never knew about these before. A mixture of sweet and salty flavours. There were two main types I kept seeing - one with fruits de mer and another with chicken. Fruits de mer is literally seafood, cuttle fish, squid, shrimp, etc. These are baked in filopastry and sometimes topped with icing sugar. The fruits de mer one I had also had thin glass type noodles mixed in. It was weird when I had it described to me, especially with the icing sugar topping, but I really liked it and glad I tried it. 

Berber Whisky

Wish we tried: Jug Lamb

FRESH JUICE is everywhere, but be ready to drink out of a cup about 100 other people drank from that day if you want the Moroccan price on pomegranate juice from the guy with the cart.

 Are you by the sea? Eat the seafood freshly grilled.

Probably the loveliest time we had was in the seaside town called Essaouira in Morocco. After spending even a little time in Marrakesh, you’re bound to be sick of every shop pretty much having the same wares, and the locals charging you up the wazoo for things that are dirt cheap to fellow locals. It’s time for some Moroccan nature! Essaouira will delight you. Head to the grillers by the sea and get ready to eat the freshest seafood you’ve ever had - caught that hour, in your mouth the next minute, and for pennies really.

how to avoid getting ripped off

- Don't impulse buy. On our first day visiting the souk (the marketplace), we promised each other we weren't going to buy a thing, we just wanted to scope the area. It was pretty smart in that we realized how many places sell the same types of things and to find out how much items are worth. There wasn't much if anything that we didn't see again at some other stall or in some other city. There are a lot of fake goods being sold as real product. Be wary, do research once you get back to your hotel. Fossils are almost always 100% fake, crystals and geodes from the mountains are real but tend to be dyed and not the actual crystal they're being sold as, same goes for the jewelery. They sell "Berber" silver there, but no one could tell me how much fine silver would actually be in an alloy like that.  A friend of ours was sold a bottle of honey - she found out later that it was really dehydrated Coca Cola. Scratch the bottom of your pottery with a key, the clay shouldn't scrape off. 

• Try to buy merchandise that has a legitimate manufacturing address on it. 

• Buying from co ops sponsored by the government are the most authentic - the products are made locally by hand.

• Some co ops are better than others. Some say the prices are fixed and they don't bargain. They do. Offer them less. 

• It's good if you can find places with marked prices. This gives you a general idea of what these objects are worth. If there are no prices listed get ready to haggle.

• 2.       Learn how to do the “walk away” technique when haggling.

• we were previously warned about how low to haggle before we left for our trip. In general we always kept in our heads how much these things were worth in general for us back home. Then we would convert that amount into dirhams (about 10 dirhams to $1 CAD) and that would be our highest we would go. Rule of thumb though would be to offer the merchant one third of what they're asking for. Of course they'll tell you it's of the finest quality and the other sellers have fake ones but hold your ground. Don't be afraid to walk away. What we definitely learned is that there are numerous places to buy almost exactly the same thing. About 90% of the time the merchant will call you back and give you a lower offer. 

• We made a friend in Morocco, an American who teaches English in Kenitra. She told us that the average Moroccan lives on an average of $200USD a month. So keep that in mind when they try to hard bargain you. 

  For the most part, they need the sale more than you need the item. 

Always carry around toilet paper. Most public washrooms don't have it, and a few times we saw people trying to sell you toilet paper. Some washrooms are not even free to use. A fellow traveler told us he's almost always had to pay to use the washroom in the three weeks he had been travelling. 

 GET LOST IN THE CULTURE

• 1.       Don’t get too attached to making an itinerary for your trip.

-          We found it hard to follow a schedule – even a meet us here at 7:45pm with an ample amount of time, kind of schedule.  Foot and car traffic can move at a sloooow pace, and the rest of the time we would normally get a bit lost and find ourselves circling back to where we started instead of where we had intended.

-          We learned a lot from a few other travelers we met as well as a few locals who worked in our hotels/riads, or were are drivers/servers. On paper a lot of the excursions or sites seemed amazing, but after a few discussions we were able to narrow down what we would actually enjoy, what was worth the money, what we had time for, and if we were there at the right time to get the most out of that excursion.  We had heard from a few people that they had had an amazing time riding their camels out into the sahara. But what we didn’t know was that the sahara was over 8 hours away by car from our hotel, and that you would mostly be on a bus and then ride the camel for only a short time. Many people we had met in Morocco had told us about the lies they were told to ensure they would pay and go to this excursion.  Some were forced to buy scarves to wear as turbans and told it was the only way to go into the sahara and then were not even given time to put them on before they were thrust on a camel and sent on their way.

• Doing a HAMAM bath is a must in Morocco. You go into a relatively unknown, possibly dangerous room, and then some women who don’t even care what you look like show up and start slathering you in black soap, and then rubbing you down with possibly the roughest bath scrubbers you’ve ever seen (think loofah but rougher). Afterwards, you’ll look at your skin and wonder if you’ve ever seen the bottom layer completely free of dead skin cells ever before in your life. The wind is going to feel different but enjoy it - it is a staple in Morocco to have Hamam baths and you must do it.