A few weeks ago, I set off to the Sahara Desert to find out more about ideas around water. However, to keep carbon emissions to a minimum, I decided to take public transport. What ‘s it like travelling from Bristol in the UK to southern Morocco by rail, bus and ferry?

As it happens, there are direct flights from Bristol to Morocco – and from only £35. But flying emits around 4-5 times more carbon than taking a train. But it’s not just the expense, it’s the time it takes too – the journey ahead was about 3 days. So why would any traveller – any tourist – really want to do this?

Well, as it turns out, trains may offer a better “getting away from it all” feeling than planes. And that’s because our perception of distance is, to a large extent, all in the mind and brain. A study of Danish tourists concluded that our perceptions of how far we’ve travelled is about a range of things. It’s not just the miles home. It’s also things like time to reach somewhere, the cost and the cultural differences once you get there. If you want to feel you’ve travelled, take more time travelling and ensure your destination has different culture and weather.

How do we experience distance from home?

And, as well as time, cost and culture, perceived distance is also about the features of the journey itself. Whether we travel in a straight line or take a more complicated route, affects our understanding of our arrival point. When we fly on a plane, the geography can appear less detailed and interesting. Flying can make the world look like a flat and more featureless 2-dimensional map. But also, travelling in a straight line prevents something happening that’s important for making memories. When scientists asked people to take 2 walks with the same number of steps, it was the one with more turns that was more memorable. It was also judged, incorrectly, as taking longer. Why should “turns” and “corners” make time move more slowly – and help us form memories more clearly? To understandn that, we need to look inside the brain….

As we approach a turn, a region of our brain that is critical for making new memories sparks into life. This is the hippocampus (see above) and it’s fired up with the possibilities of where we might go next – as well as where we are now. The hippocampus helps each turn, transition or boundary in our journey to create a boundary in our memory. These boundaries in our memory allow us to store and recall our memories of the experience in a way that aids their organisation in our brain. It helps us store them in a more organised and labelled way, helping our later recall of those memories. This firing up of our hippocampus at each transition point is automatic. That means it happens whether we’re having to consciously make decisions about where to go next or not. For journeys of equal time, we think ones with more turns take longer – because we remember more of them.

And when strapped into a seat on a plane, there are fewer turns and transitions points for creating boundaries in our memory. Arriving by planet, we’re less aware of the space covered getting there and even where we are.

Twists and turns on the way to the Sahara

I experienced plenty of twists and turns in my journey to the Sahara. Having arrived at London Paddington, I took the underground to Kings Cross, popped next door to London St Pancras, and onto the Eurostar to Paris Gare du Nord. After transfer by metro to Gare de Lyons, I hopped on a train to Perpignan where I slept over. First thing in the morning, it was an early train to Madrid, where I changed for Cordoba in the South. There were lots of things to look at and lots of transitions. So lots of boundaries were being created in my hippocampus making the journey memorable. And I saw a cultural shift too as I head further south: More Moroccan food available, more Arabic script and I woke up in Cordoba to bells from a most unusual cathedral built inside a mosque. There always those things you just can’t plan for. The weather became increasingly worse, with Storm Leon heading in my direction. That made crossing the Strait of Gibraltar a more memorable ferry journey than I would have liked. I just caught the last ferry to Tangier, before the storm closed all the ferry services for 3 days.  

I found Tangier to be a fascinating and wonderful city, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. When I started planning this trip, I’d imagined sun and heat. Instead, it rained heavily in Tangier for almost the entire 3 days and nights I was there. This was a bit ironic, since I’d journeyed south to understand more about the scarcity of water in Morocco. Over recent decades, droughts in Morocco have been becoming longer and doubling the frequency at which they occur. The amount of renewable water for each person has reduced to around a fifth of what it was in 1960. When I booked my tickets a couple of months ago, Morocco was just approaching its eighth consecutive year of drought. However, since then, a series of intense storms had been hitting northern and central regions. Those storms were submerging large areas of farmland under water and 140,000 people had evacuated in the last few weeks. Here in Tangier, rainfall over the winter had reached around 4 times the seasonal average. Morocco was now lurching from a drought crisis to a flooding crisis – a pattern typifying climate change. At the hotel desk, Eunice told me “Morocco is very famous about the sun – like sunny almost all the time of the year. Normally we don’t expect so much of the rain. Even if it’s raining, then it’s just here in the north, not in the middle and south”

“So when did you last see weather like this? I asked.

“Some older people have said like it’s 2 months and now near to 3 months of raining – like they haven’t see in the last twenty years.”

Eunice suggested to me that, as I ventured south, so I would discover a different Morocco. As Eunice predicted, while on the high speed train from Tangier to Marrakesh, the sunshine appeared, and I disembarked into a different and drier world.

The last time I had travelled to Morocco was about 25 years ago, with my partner and 5 young children. The buildings hadn’t changed, there were still drums being beaten and music being made, games being played and stories being told. But one big difference was that I have much better idea where I was. Having taken the train, I could draw a better map of where Marrakesh was in relation to my home. Consciously and unconsciously, I had been processing the location of the cities I’d travelled through and their connection to other places. There had been cultural transitions I’d been aware of too. And yes – although it was more of a shock when stepped off the plane and arrived in this city 25 years ago, I was noticing more about Marrakesh. The city now made more sense. It felt more  meaningful and special now – and I felt further from home then I did back then. And perhaps that was because I’d acquired a better awareness, understanding and memory of what was between Marrakesh and Bristol.

And it’s been pointed out by researchers that taking into account the psychological aspects of distance might tour companies encourage us away from flying. People may simply need to discover how places can be more interesting and more enticing, if they’ve taken the train to get there.

The next morning, I took a bicycle to see what remained of the city’s old water supply that flowed from under the mountains. That system isn’t needed now, of course, because the modern approach damns rivers and pipes their water through to homes. But as I’d gone further south, it became clear this modern approach hadn’t protected Morrocco’s citizens’ from long droughts. I pointed out a dry river bed to my guide Yessir, and asked him why the recent rains hadn’t filled it.  “When we had rain this year it wasn’t enough,” he said, “because 6 years is like a long period. We need to have at least 2 years of rain to fill that river. At least so we can be equal to what we had before.”

Yessir also provided me with some insight about the everyday experience of drought for Moroccans, and how it hits everyone in their pockets. “Our economics were affected also. So everything, like the price of milk, the price of eggs – everything you can imagine was higher, higher than before, because of no rain. So when we have rain we become really happy because we believe that the prices are going to get lower and everything’s gonna be stable like it was before.”

As the drought continued, the Moroccan government launched several initiatives intended to help stem its effects. These included a public information campaign discouraging the waste of water.

“They said: So now we’re in a serious water problem in our country. We’ve been suffering when it comes to rain this last 5 years. So we have to unite – all of us – to face this problem. We don’t know how many years we’re going to suffer from this. So we have to do something about it. This is how they introduce it, and a lot of people were really afraid about that because 5 years is quite a long time. So we were really afraid it may go for 5 years more, or 10 years more. We’re going to suffer from that.

Targets for the campaign included businesses such as car washes and the Hammans (public swimming pools) which are beloved of Moroccans as places for rest and relaxation. People were also encouraged to monitor and reduce their personal usage – but yessir felt that people often ignored these requests.

“They cut water – like in the Hamman. A lot of places they only open it 3 days a week. Normally its open 7 days a week, but they started to reduce it. And also to say that you should economise when it comes to water. Use a little bit of water. So it was on the television, but in the reality, no-one cares. Nah, to be honest, no one did really care. My father said “no – they said it on the television, that’s it, (but) we’re not going to do it”.

This refusal to respond to the scary threat of an enduring drought might seem odd – but it perfectly fits with so-called “Terror Management Theory” – something that we came across in Season 1 (Episode 2). This is a theory that was developed by psychologists in the 80’s. It was inspired by the work of anthropologist Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death. Becker argued that much of human behavior is motivated by our need to manage death-related anxiety. The theory suggests that existential threats, like water scarcity, cause us to reach out for our shared cultural beliefs. Those beliefs provide a sense of order, meaning and permanence, such as religion and identity, or human superiority over nature. In other words, we do more of what our ingroup already does and what defines our ingroup. We don’t necessarily change our behaviour and tread the more rational path that can address the situation. Evidence from the sciences of mind and brain suggest that reminders of mortality push us towards moving with the pack. They deactivate circuits for learning, encouraging us to carry on doing things how we think our in-group normally does them.

In the future, the Moroccan government may need more effective campaigns, because droughts here are getting more intense and frequent. But arriving in the Spring of ‘26, I witnessed a greening of Marrakesh suburbs that Yessir had never seen before. At least the current drought was coming to an end.