I wrote this a couple years ago for a publication that ended up publishing a different essay of mine instead. As I’ve started to see a few travel tour companies with excellent fall sales, I decided it was worth sharing here. I’ve since taken another group tour to Turkey, and it was an equally wonderful experience. Reach out to me here if you’re interested in having me book a tour for you! There are some very good sales prices for Travel Advisor bookings right now.
Why I Recommend Small-Group Travel Tours
A motto I’ve tried to live by for my entire adult life is to never let a lack of company prevent me from doing precisely what I want to do. This sounds obvious, but it’s easier said than done. For me, this has meant countless solo meals in restaurants where waiters gently ask if I’m expecting someone else, eight cross-country moves to cities where I knew no one, and a dozen or so solo trips where I wandered unfamiliar cities alone. Though solo travel sounds lonely to some people, the truth is that I love it. For a shy introvert, solo travel allows a kind of social freedom that regular life doesn’t. I’d never traveled anywhere before that I wasn’t perfectly happy to go alone, but when I decided to visit Morocco, I hesitated.
Though I wasn’t afraid of visiting Morocco as a solo female traveler, I had never visited North Africa, and I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t sure how accessible transportation would be for all the cities I wanted to visit, I wasn’t sure how much of a barrier language would be, and I wasn’t confident in my understanding of local customs. What I knew about Morocco was based on either negative stereotypes from the media or the experiences of female travel bloggers who had traveled far more extensively than I had. Since I wanted to see as much of the country as I could in the limited time I could take off work, I started to consider an organized tour. The problem was that a tour sounded like my worst nightmare.
When I envisioned an organized travel tour, I initially pictured a bus crammed with elderly tourists wearing fanny packs and waving selfie sticks. When I started researching and learned that there are tour companies specifically for younger travelers, I pictured wild 20-somethings on trips funded by their wealthy parents, non-stop flowing alcohol, all-night parties, and a disrespect for local culture. (Clearly I’ve seen too many teen movies.) At 30 years old, I imagined being the oldest person on the tour and everyone finding me a prude. But Travel Talk Tours’ Exotic Morocco tour went to every place in the country that I wanted to visit, so when the tour went on sale one weekend for prices that seemed way too good to be true, I bought a ticket.
From my first day on the tour, I realized my assumptions had been wrong. There was a couple my parents’ age who’d just hiked the Camino Santiago. There was a mom and her college-aged daughter. There were several young 20-somethings who were 10 years my junior and already veteran globe-trotters. Most people had come with friends or roommates, but there were a few others who had come alone. The biggest surprise to me was that I was the only American.
As my initial fears and assumptions faded away, a new one took their place—would my tour-mates have assumptions about me the way I’d had assumptions about them before we even met? The U.S. was going through a divisive and tense election, and I feared that people would assume the views of my country’s leadership were views that I shared. How would the Moroccan people and my tour-mates receive an American during a time when U.S. leaders had been so openly racist against Muslim people?
Recognizing the assumptions I was guilty of and the stereotypes I feared others might believe about me taught me more about myself than I would have learned as a solo traveler. Developing relationships with my tour-mates that allowed us to openly talk about these perceptions and stereotypes with each other was a valuable lesson I never expected. I expected to learn a lot about Moroccan culture, but I didn’t realize how much I would learn about the cultures of my tour-mates as well. My tour-mates taught me about the government in their countries, their healthcare systems, their local economy, the culture of travel, and a lot about Australian slang. We shared tents in the desert, photos on social media, curiosity, wonder, and hours of laughter. We traveled over 1,700 miles together in ten days, and I learned far more traveling with them than I ever would have traveling alone. At the end of the trip, I felt confident that I was equipped to return to Morocco as a solo traveler if I wanted to. But I also felt eager to pick the next country that I wanted to book a small-group tour to visit.
