Chefchaouen

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January 1 - 4, 2007

Monday

We left Hotel Ibis at 10 am and took a cab to the CTM office for the 11 am bus. At the bus station we met a law student from Toronto, fresh from a semester in England, who started talking to Roger while Amy was in the bathroom. We chatted with him for a bit and tried to sit by each other on the bus. Contrary to Amy’s research, the Moroccans do care very much about keeping assigned seats and we were unable to sit together.

We spent the bus ride sleeping and gazing out the window and found the open, rocky countryside outside of Fes to be very distinctive and, pardon the lazy comparison, as if straight from a movie. Rocky plains, olive trees twisted from the harsh climate of heat and cold, kids herding goats across the road… you don’t realize how often this landscape has been tapped for film and television until you see it live in front of you.

We pulled into Chefchaouen about 3 pm and headed to Bab el Ain, where we had made a reservation. Our Canadian companion, Lorne, didn’t have a reservation and tramped along with us. There were no cabs at the bus station, a lonely little outpost at the base of the huge mountainside occupied by the city, so we knew from the outset the walk up would be miserable.

We walked up the vicious hill with our bags about 1 km to get to the town center (it felt like much, much more). The steep grade was killing us, and it did not help that Lorne chugged along ahead in much better shape. Besides the hills, the walk was overwhelming with people trying to take us to their hotel, sell us stuff, or just asking us for money. Heading into town with a single traveler made us realize that we probably don’t have it as bad as we think when we come across aggressive touts. Lorne got many more offers than we did because a) he travels alone and, b) he kind of looks like Pauly Shore (this opened him up to drug offers that thirty-something married couples appear not to get). Upon arrival in the old city we found the hotel to be okay and ourselves to be quite winded. So we took it.

After a short collapse we headed into town to check out the square. Along the way a tout tried to get us into his shop, an offer we politely, astutely, refused. Naturally when he offered us his card we accepted, thinking this a short cut to polite escape, only finding we had to go into the shop to get his card. Very tricky. We went to the square and enjoyed some tea and watched people, finding there were a lot of dirty hippies (technical term) hanging out in town. We were surprised by the number of tourists in general.

We elected to drink tea at the only place in the square that appeared to have locals as opposed to all tourists, but it was kind of hard to tell with the high number of Spaniards attracted to the area and the high number of tourists wearing jalubas, the full-length, earth-colored, hooded winter wear of Moroccan men. Amy felt a bit like she was in a Star Wars movie.

The Chefchaouen region is one of the main producers of cannabis in Morocco and marijuana is subsequently sold all over town. We didn’t try it but Lorne took advantage of the local offerings (amusingly he took advantage shortly after telling us about how some locals had tried to blackmail him for money by using drugs against him in the last town he had been in - we found his spirit admirable if a bit foolishly stubborn).

We went to an internet café for a little while and found out the Kansas City Chiefs had made the playoffs. After the internet café, we had a long, enjoyable dinner with Lorne. The man working at the restaurant next door got mad when we wouldn’t buy drugs while we were eating (of course we didn’t buy drugs after we ate either). A funny form of hospitality, but we were clearly the ones out of place. Two much older men came up to play us some after-dinner “music,” providing a sliver of culture and some great comedy as Lorne chatted them up in a language they did not understand at all. He called them Billy Joel and Elton John, requested Rocket Man, and asked when they were playing Toronto.

At our hotel we found our room far too cold to do anything and crawled under four blankets and our sleep sheets (the bed didn’t look particularly clean). The room, with walls and ceiling of painted concrete, seemed to radiate cold and we didn’t sleep well. We stayed in bed until late the next morning, hoping for some solar warmth.

Tuesday

The day began with our heading out to find a new hotel. We couldn’t find the first one among the tiny, twisting corridors of the old city so went to Hotel Yasmina, which was clean but didn’t have a bathroom in the room. We ran into Lorne who was also looking for a new hotel (a ritual of lazy travelers who may often jump too early at a place when they pull into town - one we are quite good at). The guy at Hotel Yasmina took us to another property they owned right down the street, Hotel Cham. Hotel Cham was very pretty and our room was very big. The bathroom was an improvement because there was a shower stall. Even though the shower sprayed over the entire bathroom, what protection the stall offered was an improvement over the completely open shower of our previous rental. Beautiful as it was there was still no heat and the room was freezing at night. As cold as it gets in Morocco, heaters do not appear to be very important to Moroccans.

We ate breakfast in the small, tiled nook at Hotel Cham and headed back to our old hotel to grab our bags. We talked to Lorne for awhile and then moved. At Hotel Cham we rested a little and then took long showers before heading out around 1 for lunch. We ate at Restaurant Tissemlal which had a fixed menu for 75 dirhams each. It was pretty good and the interior of the restaurant was quite stylish. After lunch we walked back to the bus station where we waited for the sole staff person to open the window for CTM, finding he’d open for a few minutes at a time then close to go do load buses or smoke while a line continued to form at the ticket window. We were behind a young couple from America - she went to St. Olaf and he was studying in Morocco. How far must we travel to be rid of those pesky St. Olafsons?

Finally the CTM guy came back and we bought our tickets for Thursday. Back in town, Amy spent an hour and a half trying to find a hotel in Casablanca where we could stay and watch the Chiefs game on Saturday. Most of the hotels we found with satellite television were $250 a night, though, so it would require further research.

We relaxed at the room for about an hour before we met Lorne for another dinner over looking the square. Dinner was ok and unfortunately typical of our Moroccan food experiences to date, simply nothing special. One of the music makers from the night before found us and soloed for us without his friend. There was a weird mix of songs being played in the square that night, thumping from the more clubby bars - Ace of Base, Mariah Carey and something similar to, but not quite, REO Speedwagon. Prone to more mellow pursuits we spent the evening drinking tea and talking with Lorne about his year studying in Israel and our collective experiences with Israeli travelers.

On the walk home we were offered drugs, again, easily making this small Moroccan town the most aggressive of narcotics pushing tourist traps we’d visit. When we told the merchant we don’t do drugs he reassured us “it’s ok, it’s cheap”. Alright then, we’ll take a dozen.

Wednesday

We woke, slowly, from a very cold night’s sleep, and decided to forgo the shower due to the cold and the lack of dry towels (ours were still every bit as wet as when we left them the previous morning). We dressed quickly and went downstairs for breakfast where we had a nice conversation with a pair of Spaniards. As we mentioned before, this city is lousy with Spaniards. They were both journalists from Madrid and both spoke decent English. They had a long day ahead of them, driving to Tangiers before taking the ferry to Spain and then driving further to Madrid, some 900 kilometers in all.

Eager to break free of the square we headed through town towards the mountains and exited the remnants of the city wall to see what appeared to be the town clothes washing station. A spring bubbles out of the mountainside and two washing stations draw water along a sluice into tubs for use by the villagers. Heartier jobs appeared to be done near the mouth of the spring and we watched one woman beat a fresh sheep skin dry with a club.

From the spring we walked uphill along a cobbled path chiseled into the mountainside. The pathway was bustling with locals, most carrying goods to whatever village lay on the other side of the hills. Before long the stone walkway gave way to dirt and we kept climbing. As the path wound around the hill tops we came upon groups of women resting in the shade and a young man resting his mule and talking with his buddies. No patch of shade was neglected, something we appreciated more as we climbed higher in the heat.

The old Spanish mosque that sits overlooking the town was crawling with young local men who called out to us as we passed. Their rambunctious behavior swayed us from visiting the ruin. We found a perch on a boulder about four hundred meters further uphill and we sat in the sun and watched the boys at the mosque in front of us and the herd of goats high on the hill above us. Eventually the mosque boys moved to a shady tree-covered area along the main pathway where they built a fire, sang, and clapped.

We eventually moved further along to where we could overlook the next village, a small collection of rough looking buildings among the olive trees. The view of Chefchaouen was terrific as we headed back, the bleach white of the older city and the chiseled buildings clinging to the hillside. The mosque boys, having left their fire, had moved back to the ruin and again dissuaded us from visiting but we were content to head into town for lunch.

We circled the square for a while settling on a snack bar with a great view of the hordes of tourists and the bustling locals. While we were there for lunch some fire trucks and an ambulance came racing into the square. Unlike most of the locals we didn’t get close enough to find out what happened but they took a woman out of a smoldering residence, for smoke inhalation we think. Perhaps it was the drugs? We had a pretty good lunch and mint tea but we had to fight back swarms of bees attracted to the copious amounts of sugar in our tea. It was a great spot to stop and silently ridicule the dirty hippies (again, technical term) walking by. And yes, at this point in our trip we probably looked like dirty hippies, too.

At the room we took a nap and showered and, after some email, had dinner at Restaurant al Kasbah. Restaurant al Kasbah had pretty good food and really comfortable little private dining areas with low seating and pillows. When we came up to the restaurant the owner said “merhaba” so maybe they thought we were Turkish? It must be from Amy’s deep dark skin.

After dinner, we adjourned to the room and watched Jackass 2 in the cold.

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Photos

Chefchaouen
The clean, beautiful whites and blues of the old city are stunning.

The Band
Jamming after dinner in the square.

Chefchaouen at Night
From our hotel window. The morning call to prayer from the loudspeaker at the mosque was... aggressive.

Chefchaouen
As seen from our walk.