MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Travel writer Jen Rose Smith is a big advocate for what she calls human-powered adventure. For her, that has recently meant bicycle touring.
JEN ROSE SMITH: Bike packing is a style of bicycle travel, usually multiday, that uses dirt roads and trails whenever possible instead of pavement.
KELLY: Like-minded souls have used BIKEPACKING.com to share their own journeys, which is where Smith found the Route of Caravans, traversing all of Morocco. She did the northern half, all 520 or so miles of it.
SMITH: And it goes from the town of Imilchil, which is a community in the high Atlas Mountains in Morocco, kind of in the center of the country, and it goes north all the way to Tangier, which is a city on the edge of the Strait of Gibraltar, where Africa meets Europe.
KELLY: As Smith wrote for the BBC's website, she had been to Morocco decades before and hit what she called a classic tourist's itinerary. But tourism to Morocco is way up. It increased 20% in the year from 2023 to 2024. That's according to the tourism ministry. Even during her first trip, she longed to explore the places that were in between the tourist attractions, which her latest journey definitely provided.
SMITH: I was in a small village in the Amazigh communities in the high Atlas Mountains. And we showed up needing water, and I ended up lining up with the women from the village who go to a central tap to fill their bottles and bring home. And that was one of those places where most people don't speak French. They don't speak Arabic. They definitely don't speak English. You know, the hospitality that we got in those moments was also really touching and beautiful.
KELLY: Smith said that many travelers are now evaluating the negative impact they'll have on the communities they visit. And she is not convinced that bike packing is necessarily the solution, but she believes getting out on remote backroads and trails makes for a more sustainable way to see a place.
SMITH: I think that many people seek out bike packing as a way to be a guest in a more light-footed way.
KELLY: Jen Rose Smith described camping on a hillside under cedar trees one night and realizing a family of endangered monkeys had also chosen those trees for shelter, also just looking for a place to sleep that evening. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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