After finishing my Peace Corps service in 2001, I returned to the US via a six-week trip through Europe. I had an itching desire to continue south to Morocco, to touch the African continent, simply to say I’d been there. But the closest I got that summer was Madrid. 

In 2015, while cycling through Portugal and Spain, the desire to go to Morocco was stronger than ever. But Morocco was two hundred miles out of my way. After much internal debate, I turned south and pedaled for two full days to Tarifa, Spain, where I caught a ferry to Tangier. During my overnight stay in the city, I had a brief conversation with a young European couple. When I told them my plan to return to Spain the next day, the French man raised his eyebrow in indignation. 

“Only one day in Morocco?” he said with smug disapproval. He and his Spanish girlfriend had been traveling through Morocco for weeks and had experienced the country at a level I would not. His response stung, because I already knew one day in Morocco wasn’t enough.

The next morning, I rode a 47 mile stretch of pavement across Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. When I reached the port city of Ceuta, I turned left and caught a ferry back to the European continent. I was only in Morocco for 24 hours.
This summer, I returned to Tangier and rode the same stretch of pavement that I did in 2015. I even managed to (almost) get the same photo of my bicycle, but regrettably someone put up a chain-link fence behind the guardrail where I took the original photo.  

More importantly, when I reached the turnoff near Ceuta, this year I turned right. My ride took me across 1806 miles of Morocco and up 42,400 vertical feet. The landscape of Morocco is more varied than I ever imagined, with miles of olive groves and hayfields, rugged mountain passes, sandy Saharan highways, rocky coastline, endless hills full of argan trees, and congested cities like Marrakech and Casablanca. While I may not have whiled away the hours sipping espresso in smoky cafes or visiting every exotic market like that young European couple I met a decade ago, I think I more than made up for my brief first visit.