Basically, I signed up for this tour in late Feb/early Mar, which takes the long way from Casablanca to Marakesh via a bunch of other sites. The tour itself is pretty regimented, but do dopers have any great opinions on what to sneak off and see along that route? Or general gotchas to look out for in general?
(I also have a day and a half in Lisbon en route – to try to get over the jet lag before the formal tour begins – if anyone has recommendations for a low-intensity thing to do there).
An important question is if it is safe to sneak off? There are some countries where sneaking off is guarantied to get you kidnapped and if you are lucky, after your family pays the ransom they don’t return you in a couple-dozen mason jars.
I’ve never been to Morocco, but according to this site it has a much lower incidence of most crimes than the US. (It’s higher in something called “Crime Levels”, but I haven’t figured out what that means in the context of other crime-rate info.)
Another consideration besides being made into haggis is dealing with officials. I saw a couple of videos on traveling in Egypt and culturally it is impossible for an American to deal with an Egyptian officials for various reasons. What happens when you leave the tour and a police officer wants to arrest you for taking pictures of someone selling bread?
One phrase to learn if you sneak off. “Non, Merci.”. Moroccans are very friendly, but it always comes at a price. Guides and merchants will ingratiate you with something simple like directions or use of the toilet, but that will obligate you to spend money with them. Whatever you do, don’t accept the offer of free green tea; you’ll end up buying a $2000 rug. Don’t even take pictures of the locals; you’ll be expected to pay.
I have lots of advice if you decide to rent a car, which is the best way to see the country. Driving over the Atlas Mountains to see snow in Africa and the Sahara Desert in the same day is one of my most treasured memories.
Great place for buying locally-sourced trilobites and meteorites. And to be ripped off with fake ones.
I have been on many tours like yours, even in Morocco. Morocco is a safe country for turists. Just remember to use your commen sense walking around. The food is excellent, so the days when your are not dining with the group, ask the tour guide for restaurents. He/she will know. The same with other experiences. Ask and maybe find others on the tour if they want to join you.
In some restaurents there are two menues - a local and a tourist. They have different prices for the same meal. But most likely you will never find out, and if you do, just consider it a tourist tax 
Most of all, enjoy!
Good Lord, you have a quite a view of places outside the West. Morocco is a vastly popular tourist destination for Europeans, who actually manage to book their own flights, Airb&bs and roam the countryside in self drive hire cars completely independently of tour operators without getting arrested or abducted.
I was in Morocco for a week this past spring.
The worst thing that happened to us involved a private guide we had hired for a historical walk through the old marketplace in Marrakesh. An hour into the tour, some guy appeared and started yelling at our guide. After a couple minutes of confusion, we realized that this was our actual guide; when we’d arrived at the meeting point, the first guy had swooped in and hijacked us. There was no violently nefarious intent, he just had a different itinerary which included stops at places where he got kickbacks from the owners. Evidently it’s a common enough tactic, stealing tour groups, that our actual guide had a routine for figuring out where we were and tracking us down. (And it didn’t help that they were both named Mohamed, so when we first met the guy and said “are you…?” he answered a truthful yes and showed us his guide license.)
Other than that, the most unpleasant part of our experience was disappointment in how dirty everything was. Litter on every street (mostly because there were very few public waste cans, and the few we saw had apparently not been emptied in weeks), cigarette butts everywhere, animal excrement on the sidewalks … It’s a lovely country geographically, with friendly people, excellent food (especially the pastries), and interesting history and culture, but from a public-service standpoint you’re definitely in the third world.
Great food, pretty, things to see, but my main memories are how nearly every single person was trying to scam me. The first thing that happened to me after I took a nap after my flight was a guy followed me from the door of the hotel for like 4 blocks trying to get me to buy shit and then called me a cheap Jew for not buying anything.
I didn’t get much of that in Morocco, thankfully.
But it happened a lot in the cities of Tunisia. The locals’ instincts are very well-attuned to recognize someone who walks into a market square and then slows down to look around. The tourist-focused hustlers descend literally within seconds.
The good news is that they hover at the perimeters, creating a borderline where they can catch people as they enter the downtown core. Once you get through that cordon into the city proper, they thin out a lot, and you can explore relatively undisturbed.
Sadly, those are my predominant memories of the country too, and I get quite angry when I think about my holiday there (and only partly at myself for not having handled it better). I don’t recall a single human interaction which wasn’t to some degree trying to extort money from me, and several would be considered criminal, in a civilised country at least.
That said, Fes is amazing, as is the scenery and food. Just that, unlike any other country I’ve been to, it’s actually less fun meeting the locals.
I’m not sure if “scam” is the right word. There’s a certain transactional ethic at play there. You will get something for your money but it is often not something you had any intention of buying or paying for until you feel pressured by local norms to do so. When approached by a stranger for no perceptible reason, just say “No, Thanks” (Non, Merci)
So it sounds like my best bet is to stay with the tour as much as possible . There is “free time” built into the tour, but I of course selected it because of the tour stuff (mostly the food and the camel rides).
It’s funny that day 6 explicitly mentions shopping and that “the receipt of commissions or kickbacks in exchange for recommending shops, services or activities is ingrained in the culture of the Moroccan tourism industry”.
I’ve seen Elmer_J.Fudd’s recommendation of using “Non, Merci”, or “la shokran” frequently in a lot of other places. I’m hoping that my non-fluent but reasonably OK some of the time French will be at least a little but helpful – at least more so than any amount of Arabic that I can cram into my head in the interim.
My Nephew and Sister are going to see the Seattle Sounders in Rabat first of Feb. FWIW.
Also Marrakech is worth a trip to Morocco !
Obligatory word from Bob & Bing
I know it is not fair to extrapolate to Morocco but I am basing my concerns over videos that I have seen about traveling to Egypt. I’ve always wanted to go there but after seeing what goes on there it is a definite, “Nope!”
Egypt certainly has its issues. But you wouldn’t discount a visit to Canada because of something that happens in Mexico.
Or the US