ROSE VALLEY
I grew up around Kelaat M'Gouna in Morocco's Rose Valley.
For most of my early life, my world was fairly small. I had not really lived outside that local environment before I finished high school. Then, at around 18, I left for Casablanca for a three-month internship.
Casablanca was my first real period living away from home.
Going from the Rose Valley to Morocco's biggest city was a fairly direct introduction to the fact that the world was larger, faster and much less familiar than what I knew.
There is no dramatic speech attached to that. I left home, discovered more of the country, and started figuring things out.
OUARZAZATE
Choosing my own direction
I later studied in Ouarzazate.
My first academic direction was applied mathematics. It was not really a direction I had chosen for myself.
I eventually changed to IT and business management, which was.
That difference mattered more to me than the names of the subjects.
One path felt assigned. The other was a decision I had made.
I earned my degree in 2017.
CASABLANCA
Insurance
Later, I went back to Casablanca for professional insurance training and graduated top of the class. I then worked in insurance in Ouarzazate for several years.
Reset
COVID forced a lot of people to reconsider work, and I was one of them.
I did not come out of that period with a grand plan for three projects and a personal website explaining all of it.
What I did know was that I wanted the next direction to feel more like something I had actually chosen.
That eventually took me into tourism.
And this time, the work fitted differently.
There were people, roads, movement and constant changes in the plan. I could spend one day solving a practical problem and the next crossing half the country.
I liked that.
Tourism
Working in tourism taught me Morocco in a different way.
Not Morocco as a list of places, but Morocco as distances, roads, timing, weather, expectations, people, suppliers, mistakes, good decisions and bad ones.
A route that looks simple on a map can be a terrible idea in practice.
A famous stop can be worth making, or not, depending on who is travelling and what the rest of the day looks like.
A perfectly organized itinerary can still be the wrong journey for the people following it.
That practical side of travel interested me more and more.
Eventually it became Arhhal.
The projects that followed
Arhhal grew from that work and remains the project I feel closest to. Quick Morocco followed from my experience with shared tours. Kilawari came from the repeated requests for jobs, drivers, guides and professional introductions that were arriving in my messages.
Each began with a problem I had encountered myself. The Projects page explains what I built around them.
Arhhal Travel Services is the company behind Arhhal and Quick Morocco.
Now
Today, most of my work still sits somewhere around Moroccan tourism.
Part of it is operating businesses.
Part of it is building systems that make those businesses easier to run.
Part of it is experimenting with technology.
And a lot of it is still learning by doing something, discovering where it breaks, and trying again with slightly fewer stupid mistakes.
This website is the personal part.
It is where I explain what I am working on, why some of these projects exist, and occasionally write down what I think before I change my mind about it.