Spend the money and stay at Villa Mabrouka once in your life. You don’t need to leave the hotel. It’s a designer daydream … of a villa you saw, perhaps in an old Jim Jarmusch movie. One where you fell asleep on the sofa, and spies in souks invaded your vampire dreaming.

I wanted more from Tangier.

In my head it was romanticized. So romanticized, by moi, that no coastal, pirate-sought harbor could ever live up. I did Tangier a disservice all my own making, imagining a ferry full of cigar-chomping gamblers, the whoosh of cards and the patter of unknown Arabic vowels, as we alighted to a port full of chickens and tuk-tuks and sexy trouble.

That was not the case. Ahem.

Tangier is clean and safe, curated and very cute. Was it remarkably beautiful? Yes. Particularly on drives along the rugged Atlantic coast, where caves and little French restaurants beg you to stop. Was it as pulp-novel-noir as I imagined? No. It’s been tamed and touristed.

Ya can’t win ’em all. Particularly when winning involves arriving somewhere that only existed a century ago.

I did get to see my father standing next to a cow carcass. I did meet a drummer at dusk. I found an old fort and a young cat. I had the best tarragon chicken salad of my life.

That was at Villa Mabrouka. Do it once. Book it. Trust me on this, becuase it’s the hotel of everyone’s daydreams.

As a young child I wanted to be a writer, because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon,
smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit.
They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair, and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier
smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. – William S. Burroughs