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I found my little piece of heaven in Taghazout and easily could have stayed there for months, but it was time to keep moving. After a great first experience hitchhiking, I decided it was now going to be my main transportation around Morocco. I hitched my way up north to the ancient port in Morocco called Essouria. It took many short rides and little more waiting than the first time but it made it all the more interesting.
I spent a few days in the town of Essouria just exploring. It was nice to be back in a city again after living in a village for a few weeks and I was back to hostel life as well. It was refreshing to be living with travellers again and have a common language. Nothing really exciting happened here, just spent most of the days sitting at the port with some mint tea watching the daily catch roll in.
I put my thumb back out and headed to the cultural center of Morocco – Fez. Hitchhiking got little tough here with many people only being able to give short 5-10km lifts( I had 800kms to go). I was
actually surprised at the cars that were picking me up. Almost all of them were locals with nearly a full car already, the tourist campervans and rented cars didn’t even make eye contact when they drove by. After a full day walking along the road with various lifts I settled for a train at the nearest town and made it to Fez before the rain hit.
In Fez, I reconnected with an old friend I had made in my early journies in Morocco. We explored the narrow lanes of the old city and got some amazing food (my favourite part of Fez), everywhere you looked was some strange new food that looked incredible. I couldn’t tell what half of the stuff was we ate but it was all delicious. I thought the other cities in Morocco we hard to navigate but Fez was impossible, every time we left the hostel we just accepted that we going to get lost and you had to pay a little kid to walk you home at the end of the day. Fez is quite an old city and has some interesting alley ways in the medina. It’s a strange feeling when live
goats tied the roof of a cart, or donkeys pass by you carrying heaps of leather. An even stranger part about this city is due to the fact that all the streets are just tiny alleyways, the sun never reaches the ground and there are very few places you can go to find it. One of these places though, is the many famous Moroccan rooftop terraces. We spent the majority of our time here sitting atop a terrace drinking copious amounts of tea and just watching life pass by.
I said goodbye to yet another small family of friends I made and hitched up to Chefchaouen. This is a small village in the middle of the mountains and looks like something out of a movie. The entire town is painted a light blue color from top to bottom. There’s not much to do here except relax (on terraces again) and wander around the surrounding mountains. The hiking is here is a little different than it at home, there’s not a set trail. You just follow one of the thousands of bore trails and make your own path. It was a cool feeling to just be able to
roam freely around mountains, there’s no farm houses, or telephone lines, just the occasional man herding his goats.
Chefchaouen is up in the north of Morocco so it surprising was cold all the time. Most houses are open air and have many skylights and columns so heat doesn’t stay inside much. That being said when it rained for three days straight it was always cold and there was nowhere to go to warm up but to bed with three or four blankets.
I spent the last few of my days in Morocco relaxing in Chefchaouen. I said goodbye to Morocco by going to a traditional barber and getting my Africa beard shaved off the old fashioned way. I spent one month in this crazy country and loved every second of it. It is an incredibly diverse country with desert, mountains, and spectacular coastline. I would of never expected to see and do some of the things I did here. It’s a strange country that always keeps you on your feet. Although its poor you learn to live out of pure necessity. It’s way different to any other country that I have travelled to and
in my time here I have acquired some stories stranger than fiction, made lifelong friends again, and developed an even broader view of the world. I now sit on a plane with my bag of Moroccan pastries and smelling as lovely as Morocco does, Goodbye Africa.
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Michelle Duer
Your travels sound quite liberating! Interesting observations of your hitchhiking experience. Can't wait to read about your next destination.