Shortly after deplaning in Morocco, Nicole Wyrembeck and five other Madison-area travelers snaked a path through the bustling market square in Marrakech, following their tour guide, Youssef Amraoui. Wyrembeck, on her first trip outside North America, took in snake charmers, elaborately dressed water carriers, unfamiliar aromas, burgeoning stands of fruits and nuts and noise in various languages, none her familiar English.
Amraoui led them out of the market through a labyrinth of narrow back streets."The emotion I was feeling was fear," Wyrembeck, of Madison, recalls. "We're going down these dark, yucky alleys that smell of cat pee and there are donkeys and men sleeping on cardboard. At this point, I thought, 'Dear God, I'm going to die. Take me back to the airport.' "
Then Amraoui knocked on a door and it opened to reveal the courtyard of a gorgeous 250-year-old home remodeled into a bed-and-breakfast with bubbling fountains, floating rose petals and ornate tiling. Soon, Wyrembeck relaxed.
It wasn't the hotel that she credits. It was Amraoui, a Moroccan native who moved to Madison six years ago and is the executive chef at The Dardanelles restaurant on Monroe Street. He takes tour groups of six to 10 people to his homeland three times a year with his small tour company Nomad Travel. "Through our whole experience, Youssef made sure everyone felt safe and comfortable," Wyrembeck says. "His sheer kindness and intelligence gave me such respect and trust in him." And, she adds, "He is so committed to his country."
In addition to creating an authentic travel experience with an emphasis on his country's culinary traditions, Amraoui's desire is to promote understanding of Morocco. It is vital now, he says, given a picture some Americans have of Muslim countries as hotbeds of terrorism and violence."That's one of the reasons I started this, because people, by traveling around in Morocco, can change their mind and see it from another view," Amraoui says. "It makes me happy to change how people think."
Modern nomad
The typically straightforward question of asking Amraoui his age reveals his roots. He pauses before answering, but not out of shyness. He believes he is 34 and marks Jan. 1 as his birthday - but he isn't certain. His parents estimated his birth date for the government, years later, based on a flood they recalled happening around the time he was born.
His father grew up a Berber nomad, living in a tent and traveling with goats, camels and sheep. He eventually settled in an oasis, where Youssef grew up, and began farming dates. As a young teen Amraoui found work guiding tourists into the desert and began learning languages beyond his native Berber and Moroccan Arabic from them. He now speaks six languages, having added German, French, Spanish and English.
This weekend tour job led to a career in hospitality and travel. At college in Meknes he studied English linguistics, viewing the language many tourists knew as "a key to the world." He then got a diploma from the Institute of Hospitality and Tourism in Erfoud. Internships landed him in hotels and restaurants all over Morocco — connections he now makes use of as a tour guide.
"If I have English and I can cook, then I can travel the world," Amraoui says. "That's the modern way of nomads. My grandfather used to travel to surrounding deserts, now his grandson can go far away. And wherever I go I can get a job." His language skills landed him another job — translating for movie crews, which frequent Morocco for desert scenes. (Such movies as "Lawrence of Arabia,'' "The Jewel of the Nile,'' "Kingdom of Heaven'' and "Gladiator'' were filmed there.) Shortly before leaving Morocco, Amraoui translated for the crew of "Four Feathers,'' starring the late Heath Ledger.
Amraoui now takes travelers to visit his small home village of Mezguida (population about 1,000). They meet his family and spend time at a co-op where his sister teaches. The co-op educates girls and older women who never had the chance to attend school, and produces handicrafts sold to tourists in larger cities.
Amraoui was one of its founders, opening it in 1996 to help local women."It is a way for young girls to make some money and be independent," he explains. "Otherwise they'd stay home and wait for a man to marry them." Smiling, Amraoui notes that he has a selfish reason for his tours too: "My parents are in their 80s and it makes it easy for me to go and visit my family. It's like taking friends to the place I grew up."
The trip
A long trek riding on camels, so far into the Saharan desert that silence reigned, was magical to Dan and Judy Peterson, a retired couple from Mazomanie. They spent that night in a woven wool tent of Moroccan nomads — the way Amraoui's father grew up. "We roasted food around a campfire while watching shooting stars," says Dan Peterson. "Youssef is such a good guide you don't even know he is there. He glides you rather than guides you."
The Petersons, who have traveled extensively, said what made traveling with Amraoui different was the contact they had with people — he mixes typical tourist sites with authentic insider experiences. "It seemed like he knew every third person we ran into on the street," adds Peterson. "Every time we turned around we were engaging local people directly."
He has taken seven groups since starting the tours in 2003 and limits it to six to 10 travelers. A soft-spoken listener, Amraoui spends the first few days of a tour observing his companions and learning their tastes and interests, says Carmen Connor, from Madison, who went to Morocco with her two adult daughters in May 2007. One daughter was studying global women's health issues. Says Connor, "Youssef took her to a women's health clinic and stood there and translated so she could talk to the doctors and staff."
