Zeyu Xie ’27

I spent my spring semester on an Arabic-intensive study abroad experience with Middlebury in Rabat. As my time in Morocco was approaching the end, there was one more thing I wanted to check off my bucket list before leaving this country. Thanks to an Intercultural Enrichment Stipend, I was able to trek to the highest peak in Morocco and North Africa—Mount Toubkal.

The Journey from Rabat to Imlil

Mount Toubkal is an hour and thirty minutes’ drive from Marrakesh. The region is the traditional homeland of Ichelhiyen, the Shilha people, one of the three major Amazigh groups in Morocco. Although Moroccan Arabic (Darija) has spread across much of the country—especially in larger cities—the High Atlas Mountains have retained a large population of Shilha speakers, including our guides, Hicham and Mohammed.

My journey started from my host city of Rabat, which looks out over the Bouregreg River as it empties into the vast Atlantic Ocean. The city has its own particular feel: whitewashed houses, damp salt air, the kind of light that comes off the ocean. As the train made its way south, the green along the coast gradually gave way to the scorching reds of the inland.

Four hours later, we arrived in Marrakesh with the last light of the sunset—the humid sea breeze had been quietly replaced by a dry wind carrying dust and the taste of sun. We had learned about Morocco’s geography and climate diversities in class before, but nothing was more vivid than seeing and feeling them in reality.

The next morning, we met up with our trekking group at the entrance to the old city of Marrakesh. We hopped into a minivan and continued further inland. We also caught a glimpse of the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque, the city’s largest mosque and a masterpiece of Almohad architecture.

Meeting-up with our Fellow Climbers

The unbearable heat of the city was gradually toned down by the greenery of the mountains as we approached Imlil, a tranquil mountainside town that has become the hub for mountaineers and tourists hoping to conquer Mount Toubkal.

Here we met our guides for the first time and rented our trekking equipment. After everyone was ready, we began our arduous ascent to the refuge, where we would spend the night.

Languages of Morocco

Our guides, Hicham and Mohammed usually spoke to each other in Tashelhiyt, the language of Ichelhiyen, but they were also glad to talk to me in Darija. In cities like Rabat, Darija is usually the de facto lingua franca between different cultural groups in Morocco.

Since the 2011 Moroccan constitutional amendment, Tamazight (the language of the Amazigh people) has become one of the country’s two official languages alongside Arabic. The amendment also standardized the Tifinagh script, an ancient North African writing system believed to have been used for Amazigh languages.

Learning about Amazigh culture was an important part of my program’s curriculum, and I personally took a one-on-one class on Amazigh culture and history. These were the words I studied, memorized, copied and pasted on my exam papers. Outside the classroom, however, I had never heard Tamazight spoken anywhere in Rabat, and Tifinagh was something I only saw on road signs and government buildings.

Before the trek, I had mostly learned about Morocco through the Arabic lens. The official account of the country’s history usually begins in 788, when Idris I, who fled from the Hijaz region on the Arabian Peninsula, established what is now considered the first Moroccan state in the city of Volubilis—the Idrisid Dynasty. 

However, the history of this land stretched back so much further. The Amazigh people have been calling it home for just as long, passing down their language and traditions from generation to generation. Their conversations turned the esoteric alphabet on government buildings into something alive. Mohammed gave sounds to the Tifinagh alphabet. Whenever he saw some of us falling behind, he would lift his trekking pole, point ahead, and say “ⴼⵜⵓ (ftu).” That means “let’s go” in Tashelhiyt.

Regional Variations and Dialects

It wasn’t until I talked to our guides that I realized there were far more regional variations of the Darija language than I had expected. I had to recognize familiar sounds in their own way of pronouncing certain words. When I studied Darija on my study abroad program, our teacher would always try to enunciate every syllable so that we could understand. In return, we were given more than enough time to put together a sentence. I would always take as much time as I needed to create a perfect sentence, feeling satisfied with what I had said.

With time, I had the impression that my Darija had become quite good, especially in urban settings such as ordering food or hailing a taxi.

But the truth is, what I was doing in the city was essentially recycling the same words and sentences over and over again. Here on the mountain, though, the language took on a far more unpredictable form.

Conversations could no longer be rehearsed; they had to happen at the pace of real life, and sometimes had to be about things I had never thought I would say. I had to quickly explain how many pairs of crampons my friends and I needed—and that my friends were wearing jeans because they flew in from Italy thinking that I had invited them for a suburban hike. As kind as Hicham was, I could see him frown when I spent ten seconds trying to describe a crampon.

Before the trek, I thought I had come a long way with Darija. And in some ways I had. But there is a difference between reusing familiar sentences in a city café and reaching for words on the side of a mountain, with someone waiting. The mountains had not made me fluent in Darija, nor in the history of this land. But they had shown me the distance between knowing something and understanding it.

The Slow Way

In contrast to the fast pace of our conversations, the trek was much more monotonous than I could have imagined. Having lived in the city my entire life, I hadn’t really had the opportunity to be completely away from cellphone signals or the coffee chain right under my apartment building. There was always something to stimulate my senses or keep me busy.

Here, the only thing in front of me was the gravel-covered path. And my only task was to look at what was in front of me so that I wouldn’t fall down. (I still fell in the end.) At the beginning of our trek, I found myself checking the time quite often, and then I would ask Mohammed how much more time we needed to reach the next stopping point. Soon I realized his time estimates were more inspirational than accurate.

Naturally, I started talking to people in my group. An Australian woman of Maltese descent told me she could pick out a word or two of Darija because Maltese is essentially a variety of North African Arabic. A Belgian college student showed me a few Darija words he had learned from his Moroccan classmates back in high school (and I can attest that his pronunciation was spot on).

As it turned out, being offline for two days wasn’t really a bad experience. We had to connect to the people around us, and surprisingly, coming from different walks of life and opposite hemispheres of the planet, we never ran out of things to talk about. There was also never a moment of awkwardness, because whenever we fell into silence, we knew we were on another steep slope.

Every couple of minutes, we had to step off the narrow path and give way to mules carrying huge loads toward the refuge. I looked at the man leading them and realized that bringing the mules up and down the mountain was probably the only thing he would do that entire day. How many days have I spent doing just one thing?

Final Push to the Summit

The next morning at 4 a.m., we put on our headlamps and crampons and started the summit push. Ahead of us was a massive scree slope flanked by dark ridges and a narrow trail carved into the ice.

For the next six hours, we would zigzag along this path while seeing the unvaried landscape before us. As we approached 3500 meters, I found myself falling behind the group. The crampons were hurting my ankles because they didn’t fit properly, so I kept slipping on the frictionless ice. I soon became the last person in the group.

There was no way around the mountain, only up it. I did not check the time for a long time. I was reminded by the sunlit ridges behind us that morning had come.

Before us was the summit. I suddenly had the urge to ask Mohammed how much more time. But then I thought “why does it matter?” All I needed to do was keep going until I reached the peak. Mohammed saw me and lifted his pole again, and said to me: ftu!

Looking Down from the Peak

Outside the classroom walls of Rabat, this trek had forced me to navigate the living complexities of Moroccan identity. It shifted my understanding of the country from a somewhat singular Arabic lens to a pluralistic reality shaped by Amazigh roots. By moving past the rehearsed, urban comfort zone of my language studies, I gained humility, and embraced the fluid nature of Darija and Tamazight as tools for connection.

Ultimately, the experience taught me to value the patience required for cross-cultural communication, and to truly understand the difference between simply studying a culture and learning how to listen to it.