Lady Business: Morocco, money, and traveling while female

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-third issue, published April 4, 2019.
 

Solo, Female, Frugal: Pick Two

 
I had a glorious vacation last week in Morocco, traveling through the kaleidoscopic gardens of Marrakech and the beautifully chaotic medinas of Fes and the beachside sprawl of Casablanca and the immensely varied landscape of the High Atlas and Middle Atlas mountains. There were insanely vivid colors; warm and welcoming and hustling people; striking economic, cultural, and linguistic disparities between the cities and the countryside; some great shopping; and many, many picturesque rooftops:
 

 
There were also camels, desert sunrises, and a surreal and gorgeous night spent in the Sahara. It was a great, fascinating, rewarding vacation that expanded my worldview in the best way. It was also, inevitably, occasionally uncomfortable.
 
I had been expecting that. Good travel usually is in some ways, and Morocco has a reputation as tricky for women travelers. So I never prioritized going to Morocco during the two years I lived in Paris and could have gotten there much more quickly and cheaply. I’d continued avoiding the country after I went on vacation to Turkey, more than ten years ago, and found that simply walking in parts of Istanbul while female and foreign attracted an irritatingly high -- and occasionally frightening -- level of street harassment. More recently, I’d admired women friends who traveled solo to Morocco, even though their stories reinforced some of my assumptions about how much unwanted attention women travelers attracted there.
 
So I was glad to be traveling last week with a group of three other women; I was glad we had all spent time (and money) buying appropriately “modest” clothing for the trip; I was glad to have recently had experience fending for myself in Dubai and Riyadh, two cities where I experienced absolutely zero street harassment but still had to be very conscious of what I was wearing in what environments.

And then we got to Morocco, and a couple of days into our trip, The New York Times published this big article on the dangers of traveling alone while female. It included a reminder of the two Scandinavian hikers who’d been killed by terrorists in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains -- not far from where, earlier that day, my group of four New York women and one local man had stopped for lunch and some gentle urban hiking.

It wasn’t frightening, exactly -- or at least, no more so than the norm. The article does a good job of pointing out how common everyday violence against women (residents as well as travelers) is, and how it happens everywhere: “Violent episodes are just as likely to occur, experts note, in rich Western nations such as France, Italy and Germany as in the developing world.”

One thing that article doesn’t explicitly mention, and that I’ve found makes a huge difference, is that it’s a lot safer to travel while female when you have money. And we did. I’m not talking private jets or Crazy Rich Asians-style luxury -- but my friends and I are in our 30s, with steady jobs and disposable income. We booked hotels with good ratings (and, hopefully, no half-assed TripAdvisor handling of rape claims). When our hotels offered to pick us up at the airports and train stations, for an additional fee, we decided to pay for that security rather than trying to figure out cheaper transportation on the ground.

I could afford to double my monthly cellphone bill in one week, to pay for (spotty!) international service, because I wanted to have access to data and Google maps in unfamiliar neighborhoods. (And I was so grateful I did in Fes, when we took a wrong turn in the medina and a man cursed at me for consulting my phone’s map instead of paying him to lead us out.)

We could afford to hire a reputable, well-reviewed guide for a three-day tour of the mountains and the Sahara, rather than hitchhiking or cobbling together mass transit to get us from place to place. We could pay the extra $50 per person to stay in the “luxury” desert camp, which got us some ridiculously comfortable tents -- complete with electricity, wifi, and indoor plumbing. (This might not seem like a personal-safety thing as much as a personal-comfort thing … except that not having to leave your tent in a dark remote campsite to find a toilet can quickly become a personal-safety thing.)
 
You don’t have to have this much money to travel -- I certainly didn’t in my 20s, when I lived in Paris and when I traveled to Turkey and Thailand and Italy with female friends -- but it’s the single biggest difference I’ve noticed in my comfort level when traveling alone or with other women. More frugal travel is absolutely possible -- but at least in my experience, it’s also inevitably riskier for women, who usually have to face choices men don’t about what’s cheap versus what’s smart.
 
I still hold a bit of a grudge against some old New York Times Frugal Traveler columns, especially this 2013 piece about how one guy traveled up the Yangtze River on $50 per day, by bunking in crowded boat cabins with strangers who had already claimed his reserved bed. There is no way, I remember thinking when I read that, that any smart solo woman who didn’t speak the language would take that risk. She’d have to spend at least another $50 daily for one of the cruises or organized tours this male Frugal Traveler disdains -- and yes, maybe it would be a less “authentic” experience. But the authentic experience just might not be accessible to her.
 
One of my most terrifying travel experiences was ten years ago, when a friend and I stayed in a budget Istanbul hotel with a manager whose flirtiness pushed into uncomfortable territory over the course of our stay. He followed us down the street to insist that he join us for drinks; he sent me creepy emails in the middle of the night, telling me he was drunk and he wanted to kiss me.
 
I dreaded the last night in the hotel because my friend had already left and I would be staying there alone, with the creepy dude with the keys to all of the rooms. Not having packed a doorstop, I wedged a chair under the door (would that even have worked? Does that work outside of movies?) and counted the hours until I could leave the country.
 
But I didn’t change hotels. It honestly didn’t even occur to me, because it wasn’t within my financial reality at that point in my life -- I was still paying off my student loans, and not making a ton of money, and at a point when spending money on taxis was a near-unthinkable splurge … never mind abandoning an existing reservation I had already paid for. Why would I waste money I didn’t have on a second hotel?
 
Looking back, that seems insane. My personal safety and peace of mind should absolutely have been worth an extra couple of hundred bucks on my credit card bill. But that’s easy to say now, when I’m in a much better financial situation, where putting another two hundred dollars on my credit card isn’t going to hurt my ability to pay my bills. (Which is another horrid financial truth: People with money are generally able to make smarter financial decisions, because they’re less stressed.)
 
Anyway, I was lucky -- the chair under the door wasn’t needed, and nothing truly bad happened to me in Turkey. I still remember it as a fantastic trip, especially the days I spent outside of Istanbul. But those were the days, incidentally, when my friend and I splurged on a nicer hotel and a well-recommended guide. And that’s probably the vacation that made me realize that, if I want to travel alone or with other women, I’m always going to pay a little bit more for the privilege.
 

Lady Bits

--Cutting-edge home décor has never been my top aesthetic priority, so I was amused to read this 2018 carpet expose in The New York Times dismiss the Moroccan Berber rug as “the most obvious trend in upscale carpeting” and “a bit of a Domino magazine-Whole Foods cliché.” (It turns out that, after buying a gorgeous Berber rug last week for less than 10 percent of the average price quoted in that article, I’m totally okay with embracing this cliché.)
 
--“A favored Farrow & Ball trick is to take a simple word and translate it into French: a shade of brown that reminded the design team of a pair of pants became Pantalon, and a crisp white is named Chemise.” Speaking of home décor trends popularized by the Jenna Lyons/Domino/Whole Foods vortex, I really enjoyed this New Yorker deep dive into the business of high-end paint.
 
--“Also, women can’t only be in articles simply because they are women — they should feature in articles about everything related to the profession.” I found myself nodding my head a lot at this article flagged by my designer friend Victoria; it’s nominally about architects but relevant to a lot of professions.
 
--Book Stuff: Thank you to Whitney Hansen for having me on her awesome Money Nerds podcast (where, among many other topics, we talked about how financial stress hurts your decision-making abilities).
 
--I finally saw A Star Is Born on the plane, which was … fine. The Pygmalion story has never been a favorite, for obvious reasons, and I kept on getting distracted from the swelling romance by prosaic thoughts like, “He passed out drunk the night before this makeout session, so wouldn’t his breath smell terrible?” But I did enjoy the partial Alias reunion!
 
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