#NotANerd: Always Keep Your Backpack on Your Back (cultural misunderstanding? or attempted kidnapping?)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Lindsay. She's crazy ... and bat shit ... and I love her for it! For reals, she hitchhiked across various African countries!!! HARDCORE!!! The girl is a whackadoodle noodle, but not at all a nerd. That is where I come in handy- I'm Lindsay's navigator on adventures. See, I show her how we get places via google maps, and she reminds me to stop tweeting and look up every once in a while. It's a match made in nerdy/non-nerdy heaven. That being saiiiddddddd ... she lives her life on the road and wants to share some of her experiences to all the nerdy folk out there that may be looking to do the same. Hit it Lindsay!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @LindsayMC
When you’re traveling in a foreign country alone, or even with friends you always have to be at least a little bit aware of your surroundings.Now, I’m not saying to be paranoid but occasionally things may not go as planned. “Things escalated quickly” in the movie Anchorman and while backpacking situations can snowball, going from bad to worse rather quickly as well, especially if you are traveling alone as a 105 pound female like myself. Always Keep Your Backpack on Your Back (or in your lap.)
I had been from Portugal to Spain to Morocco in constant overland transit and I was TIRED. Thanks to not enough research on my part and horrible advice from a fellow backpacker on a train, I decided to go to Almaria, Spain to take a ferry over to Nador, Morocco. I had read about Nador in a trusted travel book and it sounded alright. Nothing spectacular but I definitely didn’t get a inkling of ‘Fundamentalist Morocco‘ which is why I was completely caught off guard when I arrived at the port around dusk.
About 130 miles from Algeria, I found Nador to be intimidating to say the least. On the dock, Nador was a desolate, old desert city and unlike anywhere I had ever found myself before. There was the port, a few palm trees and a tent with men sitting outside smoking hookah, staring at me. I couldn’t communicate in my very broken French (French is the business language of Morocco, Arabic being the primary) and even dressed modestly in long black linen pants and a high-necked long-sleeved tunic, I was hissed at by the local men who seemed to have a very different view of a blonde American woman than I would have hoped for.
As the sun was setting, I was being surrounded by men whispering in Arabic and broken English where I learned that the bus stop was over two miles away and there were no taxis here. I looked around at the rubble port town that is Nador and just tried not to completely lose my shit. Enter my ‘Knight in Shining Armor,’ Local Police Officer Karim.
Karim came out of no where, yelled at the men closing in on me and took me to exchange currency and even to get something to eat. He told me that the earliest bus leaving Nador was at ten pm and seeing how it was only eight and I really didn’t want to be sitting at a dark bus stop alone. I agreed to him showing me around the city until my bus was ready to board. My angel!
We drove around and we talked about Moroccan life and Islam and some of the problems the locals are experiencing as progressive ideas like women in the work place are conflicting with the belief as men as the sole provider and the impact of the raising housing market prices on the decline of marriage and the rise of prostitution.
We passed square mud and cement houses and children playing in rubble. I was completely enthralled in the conversation when I started to notice the car slowing down. We were in a dark deserted alley way, but that was no cause for alarm as most of the town seemed like a dark deserted alley way, however the slowing of the car for no apparent reason began to make me a little nervous. I suddenly realized that even though I was with a ‘Police Officer‘ I really didn’t know how ‘official’ that was. I also didn’t know where I was, how I got there or where the hell I would go if I left... and then Karim told me to get out of the car and he asked for a kiss. Refusing to panic, I immediately started running my mouth about Allah and women’s rights, I even threw Karma into the mix but all I really was thinking about was how I could grab my bag and run.
Understanding the situation that was unfolding, the only problem I needed to solve at this very moment was how the heck I was going to grab my little napsack that had my Passport, medicine and wallet (forget the big backpack of clothes) that I had so trustingly placed in the back of the cop car while I was seated in the front.
This is where I experienced a very important Lesson Learned: Keep Your Pack ON You So You Can Take Off.
Because I believe that people are ultimately good, this lesson sucks but trust me on this one- whether your in a taxi, on a bus, hitchhiking or even just staying at a new ‘friend’s’ house, have on you or very near to you anything that you cannot be without. Luckily, my blubbering worked and I did not have to bolt out of the car and into a totally dark, completely foreign and slightly fundamentalist city but I was ready to, napsack or not.
Karim dropped me off at the bus station, thanked me for spending time with him and even gave the bus driver instructions to watch over me on my ten hour bus ride to Rabat. I wrote the whole thing off as a cultural misunderstanding and spent the next ten hours, shivering in the back of a bus that, I swear was part of an electronics smuggling ring through the desert. All the while being gawked at by the Moroccan men sitting in front of me who were completely turned around in their seats, just staring at the little American girl, clutching her never-to-be-let-go-again napsack. But that’s whole other story...
Good luck out there, nerds!
#nerdsunite
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