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Published: February 17th 2010
CHEFCHAOEUN Day 19
After many hours of bus and ferry and bus again I arrived in Chefchaoeun, which is a Rif mountain town in Morocco. The ferry took forever to get there and the bus took even longer. I didn’t get into the town until 10:30pm, which would have been fine if the taxi drivers didn’t have some random day off resulting in no way to get from the bus station to the hostel. Did I mention it was pouring rain!?!?
Luckily, a girl came along and offered to walk myself and 3 Italians, 2 girls and 1 guy, to a hotel. The walk was long and took much longer because we had to stop and wait for the Italians to catch up. We finally arrived at the hotel just as the man was locking up for the night. I was able to get a room but I wouldn’t really refer to the place as a hotel because the conditions were more along the lines of a motel on Kingston rd. in Scarborough. As I soon found out in daylight hours I wasn’t going to find anything better. I would have to live with my toilet that didn’t
flush and the shower that was literally a pipe coming out of the wall with a bucket under it.
CHEFCHAOEUN Day 20
The next day I decided to walk around the old medina, the old city. It is very interesting to see, I would say it is pretty but it is also not pretty. The buildings are painted a white washed blue and the city is a maze of curving, climbing, tiny streets. It is so small that cars have no access and people use donkeys to carry their stuff up and down the hilly medina. Towards the top is a waterfall that the town uses to shower in, wash their clothes in, and also it feeds into their water system (I avoided drinking the water at all costs). Apparently, no one has hot water and many have no water so they will often use Hamas, group hot baths. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to live that way.
So the waterfall was pretty, the blue buildings are different pretty, and the mountains that surround the whole town are breathtaking but there is a lot of unpretty. Everyone seems to see
tourists as nothing but money. They harass, hustle, and blatantly request money. It is more than I have ever seen elsewhere. In Jamaica there were people on the street selling but if you gave them one strong ‘no’ they would leave you be; in Morocco that is not the case. They continuously push and follow you around. You can see it on everyone’s face that they are trying to calculate how much money they can get out of you. If there were 100 people standing in the main square 80 would be starring at me trying to get me to buy something and the other 20 just had not noticed that I had walked in but once they did it would be the same. So the feeling the people gave me made me hate the town and the experience of the city. It is a real pity because I would have liked to see the city more but I ended up going into my hotel and staying inside until I left the next morning because people kept following me and waiting for me outside of the hotel trying to get me to go to their shops to buy things that
I did not want.
I really wish that people would have just let me walk around and see the town so that I could appreciate it more but unfortunately their greed made me want to get out asap.
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Kathy Kisielowski
non-member comment
Ya, I remember.....
....the hassling in about 5 different languages. Although, I went on a tour with my Spanish school and a group of us were there....we did just go right to main places in Chef Chaouen and didn't get the hassling as bad but it was still very prominent. So, it was an enjoyable place for me ( a part from the mounds of random garbage in the market and Street....and the smell)...although I didn't quite as rough it as you did....and I did stay in some lavish places that were already organized. Anyway, good that your experiencing it....I found Morracco kept my sensesalert and alive!!!!!....loved the food!