Playing the tourist game

In case you noticed my absence over the past 10 days, I was on a holiday in Morocco. It was the first time I set foot into a plane since Covid, and that wasn't due to fear of infection. Rather, over the past years my attitude towards tourism has soured. For example the island of Santorini had to limit the number of cruise ship passengers stopping at the island just long enough to make a selfie at the exact same spot for Instagram to 8,000 per day, because that form of tourism is extremely harmful to the environment and the destination, while not adding enough to the local economy. With the cruise ship company grabbing the majority of the tourist spending for food and lodging, the positive economic impact of tourism per tourist is too small, compared to the damage. So I prefer holidays where I stay and eat locally, and also spend some money in other ways. Because, let's face it, if I don't leave money there, I'm just a nuisance for the location I am visiting as a tourist.

Ideally, that leads to some sort of win-win situation. I spent a day visiting Fes, with a local guide. Fes has a fantastic Medina (old inner city), a labyrinth of narrow alleys of residential quarters and shops, which is actually a protected UNESCO World Heritage. You can explore it without a guide, but there are shops you'll never find, and you'll have no idea which shops are interesting, or how their relative quality to the next shop is. If you hire a guide, you will quickly notice that there are some undisclosed economic interactions involved: The guide will lead you to certain shops, and he'll get a commission when you buy stuff there. That is just part of the tourist game, and it isn't necessarily to your disadvantage. Our guide led us to shops that were, as part of their sales pitch, quite willing to show how they were making the things they sell. We visited for example a pottery, a weaver, and a tannery, and were able to watch the artisans. It was extremely obvious that the goods for sale were not made in China, but made at the location by local artisans. And for me, there is some value to that.

Of course a hand-woven scarf, even in Morocco, costs a lot more than buying a similar looking scarf from Shein. But it costs a lot less than a hand-woven scarf made by an artisan in a first world country. And while patterns are sometimes internationally copied, getting a scarf with Moroccan design in Morocco feels a lot more authentic. I even got a hand-woven djellaba, which I'll use as a house coat, and which is something hard to get outside places with a strong Maghrebian community. We got a pottery plate with Berber design, and a hand-stitched hand bag. We visited a hole-in-the-wall bakery and bought some excellent Moroccan cookies, with lots of almonds and sesame. In general, we are quite happy with our purchases, feeling that the prices we paid were very much justified by the quality of the goods. We were happy, the shopkeepers were happy, and the guide was happy. In such a constellation, tourism feels less exploitative.