During a Christmas vacation last year, the McIntyre family had a mind-boggling run-in with someone familiar in a remote location. While hiking through Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, over 5,000 miles away from their home in Idaho, their dog’s doppelganger suddenly appeared on the trail.
“[He] is a mirror image of our dog, Bodhi, who we adopted as a rescue in Idaho in May 2024,” Aidan McIntyre told The Dodo. “We initially called him ‘the Moroccan Bodhi.’”
The family was shocked to discover a dog similar to theirs so far away from home. They greeted Moroccan Bodhi, whom they started to call Azul, the Berber word for “hello,” and they fed him water from their hands before continuing their hike.
They assumed Azul would eventually head back to the pack he’d come from, but to their surprise, the limping dog refused to leave their side.
“The whole hike, my mom, Krista, and I jokingly daydreamed about bringing this dog back to our family home in Boise, Idaho, as the world’s greatest travel souvenir …” McIntyre said. “‘Probably not possible,’ we thought.”
As the journey continued and Azul remained loyally at their feet, his future with the McIntyres became more certain.
“We felt chosen by him to be his people, and decided that if he was still with us at the end, then we would research how to import a dog from Morocco to the USA, guessing that it would be only a vacation daydream and an impossible task,” McIntyre said. “But 3.5 hours and 5 miles of hiking through mountainous terrain later, this little animal followed us — with an injured front paw — all the way back to our hotel.”
At the hotel, the McIntyres formally inquired about adopting him. They asked the hotel manager, who feeds the local strays, if she’d ever seen Azul before. To their surprise, she hadn’t.
That’s when the McIntyres decided to take him home once and for all. With the manager’s permission, they took Azul to their hotel room that night, their last evening in Morocco, and researched reliable shelters to care for him while they arranged his travel back home.
The following day, the McIntyres dropped Azul off at Ranch Beldi Sterilisation, and founder Laurence Lallement promised to look after him for a few months until he was eligible to fly to the United States.
“At Ranch Beldi Sterilisation, an incredible non-profit organization protecting and caring for stray dogs to be sent overseas for adoption, Azul was vaccinated, sterilized, fed and housed for nearly 6 months,” McIntyre said, “all while we worked with Texas-based animal transport company Airpets International to organize all the documents needed for an animal import from a high-risk rabies country and for an animal export from Morocco.”
The effort to transport Azul from Morocco to Idaho was exhausting, but to the McIntyres, he was more than worth the effort. When his initial flight in July 2025 fell through, McIntyre traveled back to Morocco just to pick him up.
McIntyre and Azul flew from Casablanca, Morocco, to Washington, D.C., then spent the weekend going through U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Centers for Disease Control screenings. After a tiring few days in D.C., Azul was finally released into McIntyre’s care, and the two began an exciting road trip from the East Coast city to Boise, Idaho.
“Azul was excited, curious, playful, in overall good spirits after all the travel,” McIntyre said. “He was as gentle and curious as we remembered; he delivered much more puppy energy than on that trail in December, when he presented as tired and sad.”
Once home, Azul finally met Bodhi and the rest of his family, including dog brother Renzo, and he couldn’t have been happier.
“He greeted Bodhi and Renzo with sniffs and a wagging tail,” McIntyre said. “One of the first mornings, we watched while he lay in the early sun, nose twitching with the new smells, meditating on this unfamiliar place and sensations.”
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