Chefchaouen


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Africa » Morocco » Tangier-Tétouan » Chefchaouen
May 27th 2007
Published: May 27th 2007
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21-27 May

I left Marrakesh full of orange juice and started making my way back to northern Morocco in preparation for returning to Spain. My desination was the town of Chefchaouen in the Rif Mountains, and it proved to be a good choice. The town was big enough to accomodate all traveling needs but small enough to not feel overcrowded. The old part of town is off-limits to cars, so it was nice an quiet, and day hikes and treks in the nearby mountains were easy.

Chefchaoen is about 550 years old and, like many out of the way mountain communities, historically had its own little peculiarities and quirks. In this particular instance, they didn't like people coming and poking their noses into the town's business. So much so that Christians were barred from the town until the early 20th century, and violaters were quickly put to death.

Muslim and Jewish refugees from the Spanish reconquest of Spain in 1492 brought a Spanish taste for architecture with them, and in the 1930s the Jewish inhabitants began to paint the walls and streets blue in the traditional Jewish color. Despite the later expulsion of the Jews, the old part of town retains its distinctive colorful look and this is a big reason for the visit of many tourists. The other big reason is that this is the heart of the area for marijuana cultivation in the Rif Mountains, and young European travelers come by the lungful on ferries to spend time in laid-back Chefchaouen and smoke hashish all day long. For insightful and factual reporting on this blog I was going to keep track of how many times I was offered the opportunity to buy hashish, but after the first two days I found that I would need a calculator and I couldn't read the Arabic numbers on the local calculators!

After a few days a Swiss man and I decided to do a short two-day trek into the mountains north of town. Each day we hiked about five hours and never saw any other trekkers - only local residents and farmers tending enormous fields of young marijuana - or kif - plants. Everybody was very friendly; nobody was bothered at all that we were walking past their fields and the marijuana cultivation was everywhere viewed as the most normal thing in the world, just as common as growing corn or potatoes. And almost all the local men were constantly smoking through long, slender wood or clay pipes. Daniel, my Swiss friend, spoke French, so there were no language difficulties and it was very nice and relaxing to get away from civilization for a few days and into some amazingly beautiful scenery.

After the trek I had a few more days relaxing in town (I finally found some good used English language novels!) and then took a bus to Tangier and the shore of the Strait of Gilbraltar.


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