American Columnist’s Solo Adventure in Morocco Challenges Travel Norms

After a moment of hesitation due to society’s perception of singleness, Emily Hoeven flies solo to Morocco, where she spent a dream vacation. "The more I thought about my ideal vacation - which I was particularly eager to take after three years of Covid-19 restrictions - the more I realized I wasn’t incomplete because I didn’t have a partner. I was fully myself, and nothing separated me from the world and the experiences I wanted to have, except the lingering feeling that I was supposed to do these things with someone else," she writes in an op-ed published on The Chronicle site.

She lands in Rabat, settles into a riad - a traditional guesthouse with a garden and a closed courtyard. The welcome was warm. "I was escorted to the terrace to have a welcoming mint tea. Among the people enjoying the breathtaking view of the city and the Atlantic Ocean were two young Moroccan women, who immediately invited me to have tea and eat with them," the columnist recounts. With a university friend born and raised in Rabat that she had planned to meet, Emily and her hosts explored the labyrinthine alleys of the Medina and tasted street food, took a boat to the old town of Salé, visited the mausoleum of Mohammed V.

They also went to a traditional restaurant for dinner (tagine) before taking the metro tram back to her riad. Her journey takes her to the Sahara. There, she rode a camel in the desert. "I danced around a campfire, singing songs in a mix of languages with people from all over the world who would never be in the same place at the same time again. I lay on the dunes at midnight with other campers, the only sound being the sniffing camels sleeping, looking at a sky so full of stars that I could only see them by looking at them indirectly."

Emily says she is happy to have taken her dream vacation in Morocco alone. "What a shame it would have been to miss out on this whole trip because I was single, because of the mistaken belief (of society). And what a shame it would have been for me to postpone my dreams for an imaginary man, to give him the power to make or cancel the trip, when in fact that power resided in me all along."