The Medina Ate My Sense of Direction and Nearly Kept Me

I want to say I am a careful traveller, but the truth is I walked into the old town of Zaffira feeling smug. I had a paper map from the guesthouse, a bottle of water, and a phone that had died on the taxi in from the airport. How hard could a walled town be, I thought. You keep the sun on your left, you find a gate, you are fine.

The medina had other plans. The lanes there are not really lanes, they are cracks between buildings that were built before anyone thought of streets. They fork, then fork again, then dead-end into a wall with a cat asleep on it. Every turn looked exactly like the last turn. Same ochre plaster. Same tangle of electrical wire overhead. Same doorway with a hand-shaped knocker. Within twenty minutes my map was useless because none of the passages had names, and the ones that did were painted in a script I could not read.

I told myself I was still having an adventure. That lasted about an hour. Then the smell hit me, this thick, sweet, rotting stench, and I realised I had circled back to the tannery for the third time. The same men were flipping hides in the same stone vats of dye. One of them looked up at me with an expression I can only call pity. I had become a landmark to them. The lost woman who keeps coming back.

By hour four I had finished my water. The sun had dropped behind the walls and the lanes went blue and cold and somehow narrower. Shops were shuttering. Men I had waved off earlier, the ones offering to guide me for a price, had all gone home, and now I would have paid anything. I sat down on a step and, I am not proud of this, I cried. Real crying, the kind where you cannot get a full breath. I kept thinking about how nobody knew where I was. The guesthouse did not have my number. My family thought I was fine. If I simply did not come out of this place, how long before anyone even asked.

That is when the boy appeared. He could not have been more than ten, on a bicycle far too big for him, and he stopped and looked at me with open curiosity. I did not have the language. I just held up my useless map and said the name of my guesthouse, over and over, like a prayer. Riad El Manar. Riad El Manar.

He grinned, said something, and gestured. Follow. So I followed a child through a maze in the dark, half convinced I was being led somewhere terrible, because that is what fear does to you. Left, right, under an archway so low I had to duck, through a covered passage where I could not see my own feet. I lost all sense of how far we had gone.

And then, without warning, we spilled out into a small square I recognised, with the painted blue door of my guesthouse glowing under a single bulb. I nearly collapsed. I dug out every note in my pocket and pushed them at him and he took two small coins, exactly two, and pedalled off before I could thank him properly.

I still dream about those lanes. I think part of me never fully found the way out.