TRAVELWITHZOE

At this point in the trip I’d been in Morocco for 2 nights (see previous Morocco diaries) and the plan was now to move on to a place called Zagora to do what’s called a Workaway.

If you don’t already know, Workaway is a website for travellers to find hosts all over the world who host you in exchange for you doing some volunteering for them. This could be volunteering in a hostel, volunteering in a small family business or farm, or even just babysitting in a family home etc. I’ve used this platform several times and I think it can be a great way to travel.

I had arranged a Workaway a week or two beforehand and it was a family living in Zagora who had agreed to host me. The profile stated that the volunteering required was a mix of help around the home (like helping kids with their homework, doing some cleaning) and computer/social media help regarding the dad’s tour business. It also mentioned that 3 meals a day were included, which was positive because not all Workaways include food.

To get to Zagora from Marrakesh, I had pre booked a bus ticket on the Supratours website and the journey took around 7 hours. The bus was pretty full so a young local man was sitting next to me, and I guess the winding roads were too much for him because he started vomiting into his plastic bag that had his snacks inside it. I didn’t know if I was supposed to say/do anything and honestly I was worried that the plastic bag might break because it was so thin. I decided to just act like I didn’t notice (even though it would have been impossible not to notice because his vomiting noises were kind of loud). I also felt bad for him obviously, and he said sorry after, bless him.

I’m not going to use the Workaway family’s real names so I’ll call them D (the dad), M (the mum) and the kids. So D was the main one in charge of the Workaway situation but he was actually away for a few nights for work so he had told me he’d send the two other Workawayers to the bus stop to meet me. Obviously they were the only foreigners at the bus stop and I was the only foreigner coming off the bus so it was very easy for us to spot each other, and they showed me the way to the family house.

It was already quite late so we just sat in the living room for a bit, drank tea, had dinner and went to bed. It turned out M doesn’t speak English and her French is also limited, and like I mentioned in a previous post, I can only speak a few words of Arabic, so my communication with M was very limited (we tried our best to speak French to each other). There were 6 kids in the house, aged between 1 – 21.

The sleeping situation was interesting. There was a bedroom for Workawayers which meant obviously I’d be sharing with the two girls who met me at the bus station. I’d shared rooms with Workawayers before, but not usually in such close proximity! I didn’t take a proper photo but basically there were 3 beds in a square U-shape around a table. As you can see in the second picture, we decided to put a cushion between my feet and the next person’s head so that I wouldn’t be able to kick her face in my sleep!

This was my first time sleeping in a room that was so hot that the beds didn’t even have any covers because it was obvious that it wouldn’t be necessary! Zagora itself is by the desert so of course it’s super hot, and the bedroom only had one really small window and no fan or AC, so the room was possibly the hottest I’ve ever slept in.

Honestly I was a tiny bit stressed out by the bedroom situation for the first night but I got used to it after that and it was fine (I usually start to feel at home quite quickly in different places).

Volunteering started the next day, and it mostly involved using the 21 year old son’s university laptop, either in a cafe with wifi or in a house at the other end of the town which the family inherited (D gets enough signal there to use hotspot from his phone for the laptop). The tasks were mostly uploading posts to his company’s Instagram and Facebook, and sorting out his website as there were certain changes he wanted to make but he wasn’t sure how.

I think my proudest moment in all the volunteering was when I was working on trying to add a certain button to his homepage with the other volunteer, a girl in her 20s from Germany (the third volunteer had left by this point), and we had Googled it several times but the instructions for this button were just so complicated and used so many words that we didn’t understand.

After playing around on the website and just experimenting by going into different settings etc, we found a page full of code and we realised we would have to basically do some coding, which neither of us had done before and it seemed super foreign to us. We literally spent about two hours trying to do it and we ended up just changing certain things within the code that seemed logical to us. There were so many times when we thought the new code would work because it seemed to make sense, but we’d anxiously reload the website and then our faces would drop each time when it didn’t work… but finally when we were about to give up, it worked! So basically we taught ourselves how to code and it felt pretty cool.

Other than the computer work, we just helped with the washing up after most meals, and tried to do a bit of language teaching with the kids sometimes. M did all the cooking and the food situation was quite interesting. She baked bread every single day, and it was eaten with pretty much every meal. Meal times were super different from what I’m used to – breakfast was at around 8-9am, then lunch was quite late like 3pm, and dinner was super late like 10-11pm. I found the dinner time a little difficult to get used to because I don’t like sleeping with a full stomach, but obviously by choosing to stay with a local family, you already know you’ll be taking part in a different daily routine and that’s what you’re signing up for.

Breakfast was mostly bread with olives, olive oil (the olive oil there was amazing), dates (there’s an abundance of dates in Morocco near the desert), honey etc. Lunch was always tagine (a meat one and then a separate vegetable one for me and the German girl because she also doesn’t eat meat), and then dinner was something like couscous with meat/vegetables, soup and bread, or pasta with a kind of tomato/vegetable sauce (with a bit of meat for the others).

The breakfasts and dinners were usually eaten from one plate, so everyone would use their own spoon to take food from the same big plate, and there were no individual plates. As you can kind of see in the second picture above, bread was torn and shared around the table and it was just rested on the table rather than on a plate.

Obviously in England I grew up hearing a lot about germs and being told that I must eat with clean hands from clean surfaces etc, so it felt a bit un-natural for me to be eating bread off a table that I’d just witnessed a baby climbing on 5 minutes before and that I’d seen kids dumping their school-bags on 30 minutes before and it hadn’t been cleaned since!

The eating bread off the table thing was pretty common throughout my time in Morocco (as well as a few other food/hygiene practices that made me feel a bit weird) but usually I just go along with whatever is the normal thing in the place I’m staying and try not to over-think it too much.

Aside from volunteering and eating, I spent a lot of time drinking fresh juices in cafes and just wandering around the town. I didn’t see many tourists during the week I spent there, so it was nice to experience a chilled regular town in Morocco. In Zagora they have a Wednesday and Sunday market which is quite big and hectic – I really enjoyed that. I also enjoyed the new experience of going to a local hammam.

During the week I was at this Workaway, D had a booking for a one-night desert tour with a family from Italy, so I ended up joining them on the tour and we used it as a chance for me to take some content for the social media pages we’d been working on.

We drove through the desert in a Jeep (it was super bumpy – my head hit the ceiling a few times), stayed in a desert camp (although I actually decided to sleep outside rather than in my tent) and went sandboarding on the dunes. It definitely felt like a once in a lifetime kind of experience.

I was happy I did this Workaway but I also felt like a week there was enough, because by the end of the 7 days I started to feel like there wasn’t really anything new to see and the vegetable tagines were getting very repetitive!

After the week in Zagora, I took a bus to Tinghir (to be continued in Morocco diaries 4)…