Unraveling beauty

There are a 150 million people on Earth named Muhammad. So when the police officer told us that our tour guide’s name was actually Muhammad and not Ahmed it had no relevance for us. What held meaning was the fact that we were five girls without a guide in a city with over 9000 streets.

We had journeyed to Fes in order to avoid going to the desert to ride camels in the sweltering heat. It was dark when we arrived and since our taxi couldn’t fit through the narrow streets, our driver had asked an “acquaintance” to show us the way to our hostel. This was “Ahmed”. He offered to be our tour guide for free. We hadn’t thought that far ahead when we decided to visit, booking the second cheapest hostel we could find was as far as we had gotten. We said we would think about it as we headed inside. Next morning, Ahmed was waiting for us outside our hostel.

Seeing the place in daylight, the muted color of cobbled streets was not what I was expecting, I was used to viewing pictures of this city with the Mayfair or Valencia filter on Instagram. It didn’t match the hyper-saturated image in my head...I didn’t find beauty in it. Life moved at a slower pace in the city, like the donkeys on the street carrying heavy loads of grain we too trudged the streets at a slower pace. Taking in the details, seeing artisans making shoes, bakers making bread, we got to see the mundane things that are overlooked by guidebooks. Then Ahmed told us to wait at a corner not elaborating on why as he hurried along another street.

We waited. Five minutes passed. Then ten. We saw a burly guy with a walkie talkie eyeing us suspiciously. We didn’t know what was going on, was this all a set-up? Were we about to get taken and sold for prostitution? As the big burly guy came nearer, we thought we were going to die, he gave us the news that Muhammad wasn’t a licensed tour guide and we as tourists could get sent to prison for traveling with him.

Guideless we struggled to find the hotspots that we had wanted to visit, a young child saw us and using his broken English asked where we wanted to go. He happily took us to the Tanneries. When we offered to pay he shook his head and left with a smile on his face. The rest of the day we relied on the helpfulness of the locals, none of them took even a single dirham from us. What was missing for me in terms of physical beauty in Fes, I had found in the curve of happy smiles and the sincere eyes of people who went out of their way to help us find ours.