The Bed Bug Chronicles: Part One – Morocco’s Dirty Little Secret

“Wait! There is an entire city painted in my favorite color blue?!” I yelled, as I stared at a breathtaking picture of the turquoise and cerulean-painted city of Chefchaouen tucked between the peaks of the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco.

Adam and I knew from that moment, that we wanted to explore the rest of what the country had to offer including the busy souks of Marrakesh, the cultural history of Fes, the port of Casablanca and the gritty artistic vibe of Tangier. Little did we know that behind this beauty lies a Dirty. Little. Secret. One that we had to find out the hard way…

When we first arrived in Morocco, we landed in the famous port city of Casablanca. After staying there for two days in a quaint hotel, Hotel Central, we decided that it was time to take a train to Tangier. Inspired by the late Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown (RIP), we wanted to taste the tangine-based cuisine, catch a scent of the legal-illegal marijuana smoke, drink the mint tea, and wander the winding souks.

As we stepped off the train, we were immediately hit with the craziness of the crowds and vehicles, and as we entered the Medina, we were ready for our big Tangier adventure. We walked into our hostel and were in awe. It was an old mansion converted into a hostel with an impressive wrought iron-lined atrium that reached all the way to the terrace five floors above. Each floor was decorated with a unique mixture of Moroccan paintings, antiques, clothing, lanterns and Berber rugs. The terrace had a relaxing combination of alternating mezzanines offering amazing views of the city and comfortable chairs, couches and hammocks.

After a quick tour from the hostel host, he showed us to our room on the first floor. When the door opened, I was even more impressed by what was inside. There were your typical four bunks, window and tiled floor but the kicker was a bathroom that looked like it was out of last month’s edition of Better Homes & Garden. I was extremely happy with the set up and was excited to spend the next three nights in our dorm. I picked the top bunk and as I sprawled out on the mattress, I immediately got an unexplainably funny feeling. I felt as if I shouldn’t sleep on the top bunk because there were a lot of bugs or spiders nearby. I don’t know why I got that feeling, but I did and I asked Adam if I could sleep with him in his bunk that evening. Being a wonderful boyfriend (now fiancé) he agreed.

Later that evening, we fell asleep with me near the wall and Adam on the other side of the bed, completely unsuspecting of what the morning would bring.

The next morning, I remember scratching my groggy eyes open and immediately felt a burning, itching sensation on my left butt cheek, of all places. I quickly reached around to attack the itch and felt a large lump on my butt. I had been bitten!

I jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom and began to frantically examine my butt cheek. The bite was large, round, swollen, angry, burning and itching. As I was staring at it in disbelief, I looked in the mirror and I noticed a massive bite on my forehead, another bite on my right index finger near my cuticle, an additional bite on my leg and another on my arm.

“Oh My God!”, I exclaimed as I walked out of the bathroom.

“Adam, I was bitten by spiders or like, maybe mosquitos last night!” I said with dismay.

“Wait, what?!” Adam replied with surprise.

“Yeah, I’m covered with a bunch of bites! Here look!”

I began to slowly turn while lifting portions of my shirt or shorts and pointing out the sites of the bug attack. It was bad and I knew it to be true because of Adam’s horrified facial expressions as he examined the extent of the bites.

“I totally had a feeling that this was going to happen! It must have been a spider or something!” I exclaimed.

From the looks of it and from my experience in the States, the bites looked like I had been the victim of a spider feast. We did a cursory search of the bed but did not see anything that would cause alarm. We looked over Adam’s body and there was a questionable bump on his back that could have been a pimple, but that was about it.

“How the hell did I get bitten 20 times and you have maybe a bite but we all know it is probably a pimple?!” I asked with fervor.

Adam didn’t know how to answer because no one knew. We climbed to the terrace to continue our conversation and to eat breakfast. Meanwhile, I decided to Google search “Moroccan Spiders”. There were a lot of articles talking about spiders being highly prevalent in the country and I felt confident in my initial hypothesis that it was a spider since I seemed to be the only victim.

We decided to live in ignorance. What else could we do? We were there to enjoy Tangier and nothing was going to stop us.

After a full day of exploring the city, we returned to our bunks ready for bed. We searched the sheets for spiders but found none, decided that the arachnid threat was no longer a thing and prepared to sleep in the same bed for the second night. I felt a slight hesitation as I slowly drifted to sleep but hoped that it wouldn’t happen again.

The next morning, I woke up and before I could even register where I was, I felt a burning, itching sensation on my ankle and then on my toe and I began to cry. I searched my body again and I had around 25-30 more bites on my body. The trail of bites stretched across my back and my hips, down my shoulder and left breast and down my right leg. And it was that line of bites that made us develop a dirtier, ickier theory – BED BUGS!

“Adam, do you think its bed bugs?!” I asked between tears.

“I honestly don’t know, Amanda, but from the line of bites, it could be.” Adam replied with pity in his eyes.

“If these are bed bugs, it is going to take forever for them to go away and the bites will scar. Great.” I said flatly.

“Maybe, we should tell the hostel hosts? If it is bed bugs, they will have to clean EVERYTHING and maybe even shutdown the hostel. But first let’s Google it to see if we can get some answers” Adam said, trying to create a game plan.

We did a Google search and tried to compare the bites to pictures we found online. Our analysis was inconclusive. The bite pictures online were not nearly as big, red, bruised and bulbous as the bites I had on my body. They resembled spider bites and according to an additional search we conducted, there were a lot of potential spider suspects in Morocco.

I didn’t want to believe that I was a victim of bed bugs. In fact, I REFUSED to believe that one of my worst fears could come true so early in the trip, so we convinced ourselves that it was somehow spider bites. We had to move rooms anyway, so we stupidly opted to keep our mouths shut, hoping the nightmare was over.

During the day, we stopped by the pharmacist to grab some anti-histamine ointment to help with the bites. The pharmacist was an aging gentlemen with kind eyes. When I revealed to him some of the bites in order to get his recommendation for the best ointment to use, his face turned to concern and disappointment.

He shook his head as he reached for an ointment in the cluttered shelving behind the front desk, and said, “This is why you should never stay in the hostels in the Medina. They are getting filthier every year. I am so sorry this happened to you.”

When I replied that I thought it was infested with spiders, he once again shook his head but seemed to hold back his true opinion on the cause of the bites. I now saw pity in his eyes. Being in denial, I refused to press him any further and walked away with ointment in hand and some hope that my situation was improving.

We woke up the next morning in our new room and there were no new bites! The bites that I was currently dealing with were getting exponentially worse in size and pain so we finally decided to mention it to the hostel host just in case this “spider attack” may have been a known issue or something they could prevent happening to the next traveler who slept in that room.

But before diving into that drama, we went to the roof top terrace to once again take advantage of the free breakfast buffet and planned to tell the hostel manager after we were finished stuffing our bellies. About halfway through breakfast, I had to use the bathroom, quickly flew down the spiral steps to get it out of that way, and that is when my world of denial blew up in my face. The French chef named Fabrice that was sharing the room with us on the first night was standing at the base of the stairs with a confused look in his eyes. I quickly said hello, as I tried to make a beeline for the bathroom but he stopped me in my tracks by stepping in my way and quickly pulling off his shirt. Taken aback by the sudden bodily display that was currently between me and the sweet relief of the toilet, I immediately saw why he felt a need to remove his shirt. He, too, was COVERED in painful red bites stretching from his chest to his stomach and down his back.

“Did you get any bites when you were sleeping in the first room you guys were in?” Fabrice bluntly asked me. “I slept in your original bed last night and now I am covered. They hurt too!”

I revealed to him the massive bite on my forehead that was cleverly hidden by my headband but refused to give him the same “shirt-off” display that he gave me. But he got the point.

I said, “Oh, the spiders got you too?! I am sorry, man. We thought it was a one time incident since Adam didn’t seem to be bitten at all.”

“Spiders?!” Fabrice responded with disbelief. “I can guarantee you that these are not spider bites. They are bed bug bites. This has happened to me before in Morocco. We have to tell the hostel host ASAP.”

My mouth dropped in horror and my stomach cramped in disbelief, as I realized that one of my worst fears had actually come true. I talked to Fabrice about the bed bugs as we made our way to the host’s office and he explained to me how this is an all-too-common issue in Morocco and that when most people return home, they just have to treat everything and hope for the best.

This was not acceptable and DEFINITELY a surprise to me. I asked myself, Could Moroccan hostels really be hiding such a dirty little secret from all the excited backpackers?

We spoke to our incompetent hostel manager and showed him our bites. I thought he was going to freak out and shower us with every kind of apology in the book, but his reaction was flat and rehearsed. He even encouraged us to lower our voices so that we didn’t alarm the other guests. This was not their first bed bug rodeo and the news was no surprise to them. I felt violated.

This was a secret and they thought they could get away with it, Ah, hell no! I thought.

We asked what they could do and they said they would shut down the room and help us if they could but offered no real solutions. That was not enough, but I was in no frame of mind to debate further because I was still reeling from the news. All I could do was to storm back up to the roof with Fabrice and tell Adam everything that happened in the 5 minutes I was away (still not having gone to the bathroom). Adam immediately went back to talk to the hostel manager and laid down the law.

This next part seems like a blur, but in the end, we spent over 5 hours researching how to detect and remove bed bugs from our belongings; removing all the items from our bags; painstakingly searching through and wiping down every book, article of clothing, souvenir, and nook and cranny; searching through it again; throwing our bags in the deep freezer for a few hours; and then washing all of our clothes; and running them through the dryer multiple times. It took all of the time that we had left in the day before we had to take our taxi out of the city. Luckily, we did not see any signs of bed bugs in our items but we were left with a sense of uneasiness that our search was not as thorough as it could have been. What if we missed just one egg?

Concerned about Fabrice’s warnings about the bed bug issue extending through multiple cities in Morocco, Adam and I started scouring the reviews for our next hostel in Chefchaouen and the results were extremely disheartening. Not only did that hostel have multiple bed bug complaints over the course of 6 months but every other hostel did too. We COULD NOT find a SINGLE hostel in the city that did not have a recent bad review involving the pests. We did not know what to do. We considered changing hostels to a hotel room but realized that we would not be able to do that until we arrived due to the lack of available hotel rooms online in Chefchaouen.

We decided to continue on our way but we felt disgusting and left the hostel feeling as if we were carrying the black plague in our backpacks.

The hostel never offered a refund and gave us a disingenuous goodbye as we left for Chefchaouen. There was no use in trying to fight them any further, it was clear that they weren’t going to do anything about it and that the infested room wasn’t going to get a thorough cleaning.

Goodbye forever! I am going to reveal this dirty little secret of yours! I thought, as we rounded the narrow street and lost sight of that wretched place.

I dared to let myself feel a sense of relief but something told me that our ordeal had only just begun…

For part two of this saga, click here.