Hello from Barrage Mansour Eddahbi, a reservoir in the city of Oarzazate! 🇲🇦
Camping isn’t what I thought it would be in Morocco. Silly me thought I’d be pulling my Irish, French and Spanish antics and sleeping in the corner of gas stations, supermarkets and parking lots. But things are just different here.
It’s a hard life in this country so people make money any way they can and sometimes it’s making up a job like a parking lot attendant and now whoever parks on that street owes them money for parking there. It’s not an official job, it’s just how people make a living. I get it. Now me being on a bike half my life REFUSES to pay for parking. This is just a principle I have unless I’m in a high theft area. I chose this means of transportation for a reason. So these parking lot guards frustrate me.
When I camped here at this reservoir, the “guard” played loud music outside my tent at night waiting for me to come out and then waited again for me in the morning. Little did he know, it caused me great paranoia wondering if this was going to turn into a situation whether I would have to defend myself in the middle of the night and how long he would wait outside my tent for. You have no idea what runs through a solo female travelers’ mind when there’s a male outside my tent at night. I had to really question what was reality: was it the actual situation or my mind racing of the fears of what could happen? It was a mind fcuk and I stayed up for hours with my heart racing.
So this was my experience at this lake. Photos look happy, but they don’t show my anxiety staying up at night listening to every little sound. These types of nights, I just put my earplugs in and hope I wake up in the morning. I just do it with fear.
I don’t want your sympathy, I just want you to understand that I have fear and still do this. I’m not any better or stronger than you.
If I can do it, so can you.