Travel Tales Collections: Morocco & North Africa

By: Michael Brein

Narrated by: Gary Roelofs

Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Travel Tales Collections: Morocco & North Africa, No. 10, May 2015, is part of Michael Brein's Collections travel tales series and contains among the best travel stories from Michael's huge collection of travel tales that he has gathered in interviews with nearly 1,750 world travelers and adventurers during his four decades of travel to more than 125 countries throughout the world.

Travel Tales Collections are groups of very interesting similar travel stories on a variety of very specific travel subjects, themes, or countries, such as close calls, great escapes, pickpocketing, scams, safety and security in travel, Paris, Morocco, Mexico, and so on. Eventually several hundred collections on all sorts of specific travel subjects, themes, and countries will be available on all the major eReaders.

A Morocco or other North Africa travel story is probably somewhere in the news today about something or other that is going on with a traveler in North Africa!

And so it goes. There's hardly a day now that someone is not having an incredible North African travel experience of one kind or another. Therefore we're taking a closer look at North Africa, particularly Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and the Sahara travel stories in this issue of Travel Tales Collections.

Since North Africa has so much to offer the traveler in regard to the psychology of travel, we should take a much closer look at what actually happens to people while traveling in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa. And so, in The Travel Psychologist Travel Tales Series, that's exactly what I am doing in this current issue of Travel Tales Collections, No. 10 for May 2015.

North African travel and life stories include the full range of the human travel experience, including all aspects of what traveling is all about, almost no matter where.

©2015 Michael Brein, Inc. (P)2015 Michael Brein, Inc.

Nothing Recent, Revelatory or Relevant

What would have made Travel Tales Collections: Morocco & North Africa better?

The 12 minute intro is self congratulatory and repetitive. We are told 3 times that the author has been to 125 countries, but he certainly hasn't been to North Africa recently if these tales are any indication. I listened to the first 14 chapters, most of them drug infused tales from the 70s or unverified 3rd party tales of blondes kidnapped for white slavery - nothing identified itself as being from this century. The author bills himself as a Travel Psychologist, claims to have even coined the term, but unless it takes places after chapter 14, no insight is given. The whole things comes off as a "Darwin's List" of stupidity.

Has Travel Tales Collections: Morocco & North Africa turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes. Simply put, I was hoping for a compilation of tales that provided color and context for any upcoming trip. There is nothing to be gained in these tales except the knowledge that hasheesh was plentiful and potent 40 years ago.

How could the performance have been better?

The narrator conjures up images of the author and the voice feels authentic but one or two of the tales are from a woman's perspective and would have been better narrated in a woman's voice. I didn't understand that the teller was a woman until quite late into the stories as a result.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I enjoyed one tale of a man who connected with a group of shop merchants in the Medina over music. He made certain assumptions about them, but after having lunch, and later, dinner with them, found himself enlightened and discovering trust. OF COURSE, the story ends with the group smoking hash in a rooftop bar and the teller becoming so loaded that he had to be helped back to his hotel.

Any additional comments?

I would be interested in a chronicle of recent travel tales, but this isn't it.

Ridiculous

From the beginning this book was full of nothing. The author droned on about how perfect he was to write travel stories for nearly the first 3rd. The narrator felt like a hokey tour guide at a petting zoo. All seemingly harmless until I realized I was listening to people recount stories they had heard about women being sold into white slavery for an hour. No facts, no first hand accounts just heresy. I'm planning a trip to Morocco and was looking for at min some cultural info or tips and this felt like an old racist man trying to scare women into not traveling. Dated, nonsensical, poorly executed garbage. The author being a psychologist only concerns me more. The fact that he also wrote about called "women traveling alone" a further clue into some sort of fetish for the author. A BIG THUMBS DOWN.