Moroccan Memories: How a Recent Vacation Resurrected Past Adventures and Sparked a Journey of Rediscovery

Rereading my old travel diary launched me on a mission to find the best friend with whom I’d lost touch decades earlier

Last November, my boyfriend and I took a 17-day, custom-designed vacation to Morocco that included a personal driver with whom we toured the country, from Fez and Rabat to Chefchaouen in the north, Marrakech in the south, the Sahara in the east, and Essaouira on the coast, staying in four- and five-star riads and experiencing the best of that country’s cuisine and culture.

But the journey also resurrected memories of a very different trip I made almost 50 years earlier (Gasp, am I that ancient?) with my friend Kay.

She and I had hitchhiked from London through France, Spain, and around Morocco, staying in youth hostels, camping sites, and cheap, flea-infested hotels.

Murky memories included fleeing umpteen men eager to give us more than a lift, getting lost and letting the road and serendipity take us, a cholera outbreak, Kay losing her passport and money and working in the kitchen of the Casablanca youth hostel, and us inspecting Moroccan troops at the behest of the local police chief and commandant of a military camp.

No surprise that I had always longed to return to Morocco and explore it in a more luxurious style.

To refresh my memory, I dug out my diary from way back then, scrawled on an onionskin airmail letters pad, which I hadn’t read in decades.

Its hilarious, revealing, and sometimes scary contents plunged me down a rabbit hole in search of my 18-year-old-self, and also on a mission to find my friend, with whom I’d lost contact forty years earlier. Where was she? Was she even still alive?

London Swings

I first met Kay around 2 am down the King's Road in London, circa 1970. For reasons lost in the sands of time, I was trudging home by myself to the nearby Victoria Hotel, where I had a job as a live-in chambermaid.

Back then, many of us students made the pilgrimage south for the summer, eager to cast off the parochial pall of north-east Scotland for the sophistication of swinging London.

A Mini Cooper pulled up and its handsome, shaggy-haired driver asked “Would you like a lift?”

Another guy beamed at me from the passenger seat. A woman peered out from the back.

I took a risk and clambered in next to a beautiful woman. She had full lips, a gap between her two front teeth, enormous blue eyes, and feathered, streaked hair. She sat, languidly blowing smoke from her Benson and Hedges cigarette. Every so often, ash would fall, unnoticed, on her navy and white, polka-dotted voile dress. Burn marks punctuated its hem.

“We were driving around looking for interesting people to pick up,” Kay explained in her, to me, posh accent, as if it were a sport.

I was thrilled that the long, thrift-shop black velvet coat over the ankle-length dress that my mum made from a Simplicity pattern had rendered me “interesting.”

Mike, the driver, was an antiques dealer with a stall in the Kensington Market. The guy in the passenger seat has faded into oblivion.

After we drove around for a while, they invited me back to their flat at the bottom of the King's Road. The living room walls were painted electric blue and hung with colorful tapestries. Giant cushions lay scattered over the carpeted floor. The furnishings were antiques.

Mike sat on a cushion and rolled joints, and, in the parlance of the day, we “rapped” all night, about God only knows what.

My new friends were the epitome of cool, and they had focused their gilded gaze on me. I basked in the glow.

As dawn rose, Mike drove me back to the Victoria Hotel in time for my 6 am shift. I’d like to think that my fellow chambermaid and best friend Susan, with whom I’d made the trek south, was relieved to know that I had been neither murdered nor sold into sex slavery, thought she didn’t really say much.

The next day, Kay called me at the hotel to say that Mike had invited me and Susan to move into the King's Road flat while he was away on business.

Susan and I jumped at his offer. Neither of us wanted to spend our summer cleaning toilets in a grotty hotel. And we soon landed jobs as waitresses.

After the summer unspooled in a haze of drugs, adventure, and exploration, Susan and I went back to school (yes, we were still at school) in Aberdeen.

Kay and I kept in touch, and the following summer, we decided to hitchhike to Morocco, then an exotic destination frequented by bohemians, hippies, and rock stars like the Rolling Stones. I had already youth-hosteled in both Scotland and France, so I knew the ropes.

Unlike the Rolling Stones, we stayed in youth hostels

Saturday, 17 July

Left London at 11 am. Got lifts easily. Met a guy called Ted and smoked a joint. Got on the ferry to Boulogne at 4:30 pm. Stayed at the youth hostel. Met some very nice French people with a sports car who took us out for a ride. Next morning, they gave us a lift on the road to Abbeville.

Sunday, 18 July, Kay’s birthday

An American guy in a Mercedes took us to Paris. Got lost in Paris. Some guys redirected us, then got lost again. Got a lift from two Spanish guys. They asked us to sleep with them. We declined and got out. Three French guys gave us a lift to Chartres. One was a member of a flying club outside Chartres. One minute I was on the ground and the next I was up in a glider plane flying all over Chartres. It was beautiful. I’d never been in a glider before. Incredibly fantastic.

Monday, 19 July

Left Chartres and got a lift with a nightclub singer. When he heard we’d never eaten French food, he insisted on buying us an expensive meal. We had melon marinated in wine, and I had veal a la crème. Kay had steak au poivre aux Bordelaise. Magnifique. Then came cheeses, ice cream, and lots of red wine. Felt very drunk and sang along with the nightclub singer. He took us to the hostel in La Rochelle, a pretty place on the coast.

Tuesday, 20 July

Weather gorgeous. A Spanish guy took us across the border to San Sebastian. Hostel full. He found us a boarding house and went miles out of his way to help us. We are tired but happy, and getting brown. Have left my soap in La Rochelle. Kay has diarrhea.

From San Sebastian, we headed south through the dictator Franco’s Spain to Valencia and Pamplona. We slept on beaches and woke up covered in mosquito bites.

“Holiday Health Scare: Cholera”

The headlines in a British paper alerted us to a cholera epidemic in southern Spain. We scrambled to get a free cholera injection, forcing us to wait 7 days in Spain to get our second.

Tuesday, 27 July

Saw El Cordobes at a bullfight in Valencia. Very exciting!

Loss list:

1 smock, trousers, shorts, vest, talc, sandals, 3 cakes of soap, hairbrush, soap container, towels, spoon, knickers, but no weight.”

When we returned for our second cholera injection, the Sanidad told us we didn’t need it after all, as we’d already had two-in-one. (!)

While there, we met up with two American guys, with whom we hit it off, and decided to travel with them to Morocco.

I don’t think the Rolling Stones had this kind of trouble

Monday, 1 August

Took the boat for Spanish Ceuta. North Africa looks like Spain. White buildings and palm trees. Got the bus to Tetouan. They refused to let one of the Americans into Morocco because of his long hair. So, we all got off the bus while Kay sat by the side of the road and cut his hair. But he still couldn’t get in because his hair in his passport photograph was long and now it was short. Crossed back in to Spanish Ceuta to try and jump a bus to get in inconspicuously. More hassles. We still couldn’t get through because they thought we had only one vaccination, so we had to get off the bus and remove all our luggage again. Hassled the doctor, who eventually understood we had two-in-one vaccinations, and we finally make it into Morocco.

After spending a few days on a beach with the two Americans, Kay and I hitchhiked to Chefchaouen, in the Rif Mountains, before heading south to Rabat and Casablanca, where disaster struck. Kay left her bag with her money, passport, and papers in a car driven by some French guys who were touring Morocco.

“I could have wrung her neck”

We notified the police and applied at the British Consulate for a new passport, while still hoping they would return with the bag. When they didn’t, the youth hostel, hearing of our troubles, offered Kay a job working in the kitchen. We agreed she should stay while I traveled south by myself to Marrakech, to sample its many wonders.

When I returned to Casablanca a few days later, Kay was standing outside the youth hostel, clutching her recently-returned bag, and chatting with the French guys. “All our problems are over,” I wrote in the diary.

After Casablanca, our trip continued in an equally haphazard fashion — dependent on the kindness of strangers and the protection of our guardian angels to ensure that we were not abducted, raped, or worse.

We were two free spirits, high on life, convinced that nothing bad could happen to us that we couldn’t handle.

Rereading the diary, I barely recognize the person I was then. I am both appalled by our ignorance, foolishness, and apparent lack of curiosity about the cultures of the different countries we traveled through. But I’m also impressed by our joie de vivre, love of adventure, and the pleasure we took in each other’s company.

After we returned from Morocco, Kay came back to Aberdeen with me. While I went to college, she got a job in a hairdressing salon, and we moved into a flat together.

Soon after, she met an acquaintance of mine, a clever, charismatic, handsome poet who was heavily into drugs and booze.

They fell in love, married, and had a daughter. He did time for selling drugs. Sometime after that, she left him.

I, meanwhile, went to college in Edinburgh, then moved to London to work. Kay and I lost touch. Later, I moved to New York.

Over the years, I always wondered where she was and if she was happy. And I wondered, did Kay ever think of me?

What ifs

Looking back, I couldn’t help but ponder, what if I hadn’t accepted their lift that night?

What if she hadn’t returned with me to Aberdeen?

In either case, she would never have met her poet, and she would never have had her baby. Who knows where life would have taken her?

When I returned from my second Morocco trip, I became determined to find her.

When attempts through social media proved fruitless, I contacted my cousin who lives in Aberdeen and who had friends who knew Kay’s husband. They eventually got through to him on the phone.

The news wasn’t good. Kay and her ex-husband had only stayed together about five years before she returned to London with her daughter.

But the heartbreaking news was that Kay had dementia and was in a nursing home outside London.

I indicated that I would like to get in touch with her daughter, who lives near her father, to ask about Kay. I would have told her how much fun her mother and I had. How much her mother had meant to me. And how, were it not for me and the fickle hand of fate, she might not even have been born.

But I heard nothing in response.

Finally, I had to accept that the beautiful, fun-loving, free spirit I once knew is no longer with us, at least not mentally.

I had to accept that that chapter of my life was finally closed.

But I thank the habit of diary-keeping and the art of storytelling for keeping her memory alive.

And seemingly, I learnt nothing from our misadventures in Morocco, because the following summer I set off with another friend to hitchhike from Dubrovnic, through Tito’s Yugoslavia to Greece, and on to Athens, and from there to the islands of Ios and Crete.

Once bitten by wanderlust, you always have it, and no amount of mosquito bites, cholera epidemics or bouts of diarrhea can dislodge it.

A spirit that continues in me today.

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