12 Days in Morocco by Camel, Taxi, and Train

Follow photographer Cait Oppermann on a quest to find the Morocco tourists don’t often see.

When photographer Cait Oppermann set out to roam Morocco for 12 days, she was a little concerned. “I had this expectation that when I would be walking through the medina in Fez, it would be this super-touristy experience,” she says.

Everything she’d see, she feared, would be a mere relic of an authentic culture, transformed into a commercial product for foreign visitors — a gimmick.

Instead, what the 29-year-old New Yorker found was just the opposite. In Fez, in the bustle of -Marrakech, in the dunes of Erg Chebbi, and up in the Rif and Atlas mountains, Oppermann discovered a Morocco of, by, and for Moroccans — a country where it’s simply normal to go shopping for a teapot in a sprawling, unesco-protected ninth-century labyrinth. “That was what was so cool about it,” she says. “All that stuff that is so interesting and beautiful to an outsider is still functional.”

Oppermann used nearly every type of conveyance to crisscross the country. She’d hoped to travel a lot by train, and did make the long journey by rail from Fez to Marrakech, but says many of the places she wanted to visit weren’t reachable that way. Instead, she took camels, taxis — one driver thought nothing of the four hour haul from Ouarzazate to Marrakech — and buses.

One of those was a speedy, sterile tourist coach, but for her work, Oppermann preferred the local Moroccan one. It was flocked with vendors selling “tissues and dates and nuts and headphones,” the passengers were all heading out to family in the desert — and it left an hour and a half late. “All the Moroccans were cool and collected about it,” Oppermann says.

At Erg Chebbi, a dune sea at the edge of the Sahara, Oppermann rode a camel and spent the night in the sands, but found herself most taken with her guide, Mustafa, a Berber who felt quite at home here in the desert. “He just had this amazing sense of wonder,” she says. “Despite being there hundreds of times, it still meant something to him to experience sunrise there.”

Mustafa, who spoke “poetically and fondly” of the Sahara, was thankful “to be living a more traditional Berber lifestyle,” she says. “He wasn’t fond of the chaos of Marrakech.”

Oppermann, however, loved that chaos. Her work is known for a style that’s both nuanced and playful, whether she’s photographing Nike campaigns or dog shows, and in the medinas she could simply observe life unfolding around her, knowing it wasn’t being staged for her benefit. Only occasionally did she have to scramble up to a rooftop in pursuit of a shot; most of the time, her subjects appeared naturally.

“There’s a choreography to the medina that I think is really beautiful,” she says. “You know, there could be 100 ­people packed into a tiny space, and somehow you hear a motorbike coming through and it’s like a school of fish — people just know where to go.”

About the photographer: Cait Oppermann is a New York-based photographer working in editorial and commercial photography. She is represented by East and her clients include Nike, Google, The FADER, GQ, The New Yorker, and WIRED, among others. She is a Young Guns winner as well as one of PDN’s 30 Photographers to Watch in 2017.