Morocco Today Tours founder Zaid Boutachtouin writes personally about growing up in Morocco, the moment he decided to share his country with the world, and what authentic travel really means.
May 25, 2022
I grew up in a small town in southern Morocco, not far from the Sahara. My father was a Berber guide who took French and Spanish travellers into the desert long before there were proper roads to Merzouga. He did not speak much about his work at home, but occasionally, late at night, he would describe the look on a traveller’s face when they saw the dunes for the first time. That look, he said, was the whole point.
I did not understand what he meant until I was older and began to travel myself. I went to university in Casablanca and then spent a year in Europe, seeing cities I had only read about. And I remember the strange feeling of walking through beautiful places and feeling somehow untouched by them — moving through them like a tourist rather than a traveller. I was ticking boxes. I was not present.
It was when I came home — when I drove south through the Atlas Mountains as the sun was setting and watched the light turn the kasbahs the colour of copper — that I understood something my father had been trying to tell me. Morocco does not let you remain untouched. It insists on you. The colour, the noise, the smell of spice and smoke, the generosity of its people, the immensity of the desert — it all demands that you pay attention.
“Morocco does not let you remain untouched. It insists on you. That is what makes it unlike anywhere else on earth.” — Zaid Boutachtouin
I founded Morocco Today Tours because I wanted to create the kind of travel experiences my father was part of — journeys that changed people rather than simply entertained them. I wanted to connect visitors with the real Morocco: not the postcards and the Instagram shots, but the families, the stories, the food cooked over wood fires, the silences in the desert that feel ancient and alive at the same time.
More than a decade later, I am still moved by what I see every time I welcome a new guest to this country. I watch them arrive slightly nervous, slightly uncertain, carrying all the questions first-time visitors carry. And I watch them, over the days that follow, slowly surrender to Morocco. By the time they leave, something has shifted. They are more present. More open. More themselves.
We believe that the best travel is slow. We believe it involves sitting with people, not rushing past them. We believe that a meal shared in a stranger’s home is worth more than ten nights in a luxury hotel. We believe that the Sahara at dawn is one of the most important things a human being can witness. And we believe that Morocco — our country — is one of the most generous, beautiful, and misunderstood places on earth.
If you are reading this, wherever you are in the world, I want to invite you to come and see Morocco with us. Not the Morocco of guidebooks and airport boutiques. The real one. The one that insists on you.
Morocco Today Tours was built on a very simple idea: that travel should transform you. Morocco has the power to do that better than almost anywhere else in the world. We are here to make sure you experience it properly. Come and find out why this country changed the way I travel — and why I think it will change you too.
