The #1 MOST important thing to bring when traveling around Morocco

I’m not going to be dramatic: this is THE most important travel advice I can give anyone (especially women) who plan to travel around Morocco. All other Morocco travel tips pale in comparison to this one. We’ve talked about travel tips for Morocco before, but this is our biggest one.

Are you ready? It’s important.

DO. NOT. FORGET. TOILET PAPER.

Seriously. Let’s talk about it.

What I didn’t know during my first trip to Morocco

Before I moved to Morocco, I had done some traveling internationally, so I’m not exactly sure why it came as such a surprise. However, I don’t think I was fully prepared for exactly how the bathrooms operate here.

I had never been somewhere that had the types of toilets not you’ll find all around Morocco, particularly outside of the big city. I wasn’t even sure what to call them, because here in Morocco they call the regular, porcelain, sit-down toilet “western toilets” and the squat-over-the-hole type toilets “regular toilets”. From what I can see online, they’re just called squat toilets. Which is like… yeah, that makes sense.

When you’re in one of the major cities like Casablanca or Marrakech, you may not run into this type of toilet nearly as often. But once you leave a major city, this type of terrifying toilet is what you’ll see most of the time.

I’m not going to write a guide on how to use this type of toilet, because I don’t fucking know. My husband’s parent’s house had only this toilet at their house, but I was struggling with so bad that they literally install a western toilet. Just for me. Because they are amazing angel people and I am an idiot. And I’m sure they had a conversation amongst themselves where they had to ask “how do we get the white girl to stop peeing on herself in our house?”

I will include a link to Wikipedia about squat toilets so you can figure it out. And when you do, please let me know.

When traveling around Morocco, you must bring toilet paper

Listen, I don’t know how Moroccan women handle the bathroom situation. I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid to look stupid, so I’m just going to remain ignorant. Maybe they all carry toilet paper around with them wherever they go?

What I do know is the fact that not a single toilet within the entirety of Morocco has toilet paper. If there is, I’ve yet to find it. Not restaurants, not cafés, not squat toilets, not western toilets. Not in malls, nor gas stations, nor stores. I think I found one toilet in Morocco that had toilet paper, and I got so excited that I texted my friend. It was a big deal.

So now, I religiously bring toilet paper with me everywhere. Well, not toilet paper. I bring these little packs of tissue paper that they sell everywhere. But you will not catch me without at least one of those in every single bag that I own. Going to do your business just realize that you have absolutely no way to dry yourself is the worst situation, and it kept happening when I first moved here because it’s just something we don’t think about in the United States. I took for granted the fact that US toilets generally have TP available.

But now I think about it. Often.

A major gender issue

Okay, this is the part of the toilet article where I’m going to get a little bit philosophical. However, my husband has made comments to the effect of “women just don’t like to travel as much as men.” Or something like that. He said that the women in his life just aren’t as open to going on trips or adventures. Women prefer to stay indoors and don’t like to go out as much. But I’ve developed a theory in my time here, and it’s directly related to bathrooms.

Even after just a couple of hours in Morocco, one thing you’ll notice is that men treat this country like a toilet. Seriously. Several times a day, I’ll take a break from my work, wistfully look out the window, and have it utterly ruined because I see some guy peeing on the side of the building.

It’s very normal here, but men just seem to pee anywhere. Everywhere. All the time.

Conversely, women have a much harder time finding bathrooms because there aren’t a lot of public restrooms available. And the bathrooms that are available? Dubious quality at best. I mean, dubious. And by dubious, I mean very gross.

I definitely don’t think women are less adventurous than men, and I have had this conversation with my husband. At the end of the day, you’re going to want to be as comfortable as possible wherever you are. And I just don’t think Morocco has the infrastructure yet to make women as comfortable as men when traveling. Because we don’t have the luxury of peeing everywhere.

Other Morocco travel tips when it comes to bathrooms

• Often when there are bathrooms, they will have a bathroom attendant. Try and have some coins available to tip them if you can.
• If it’s an emergency, sometimes the bathroom attendance will have some tissue paper that they can either give you or sell you.
• Keep a cache of tissues with you at all time. Seriously. Thank me later.