Resting up in Chefchaouen
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
15
21
Trip End
Ongoing
Chefchaouen, Morocco
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
I woke up this morning, on Mother's Birthday, in enchanting, pretty, restful Chefchaouen. Out of my window I look up into the nearest slope of the Rif Mountains, rocky in places, and lush and green with grass, trees and flowers in others, and with the white houses of the region dotted around the slope. Below and around me is the Chouen medina, or old town(Chouen is the original name which means something like 'mountains'; Chefchouen means 'look at the mountains''!) . All of the houses and shops in the narrow, twisting lanes are painted a mix of white and a particularly pale but vivid lavendar. Very mediteranean (sp?) but softer and prettier. The shops add additional colours of rugs, lamps, bags, clothes, jewellery and oranges, everywhere piles of oranges and the best pure orange juice in the world.
My hotel room is costing 18euros a night, ie about $27, so is a very expensive option for the area. For that I have my own little room with two single beds, looking out through a pretty grill onto the mountains and the town. The decorative grills on most windows in Morocco are a hangover from the days when women were allowed to look out through windows, but not to be seen from outside. There is also, blessedly, my own bathroom which is clean and new and charming even, despite the low door which has nearly knocked me out once already. All the rooms in the hotel are around a central atrium, and on the top of it all is a roof terrace with spectacular views.
Dinner last night was with an Australian couple who I met on the bus from Fes, and Diane from the US via Instanbul, Thailand and Fes. A guy from Finland was going to join us but got caught up. Insh'Allah! (as Allah wills). I had chicken tagine, fresh salad and goat's cheese, orange juice, bottled water and mint tea for about $13. This is probably as typical a Moroccan meal as there is - almost all dinners comprise either tagine or couscous, so I wasn't surprised that Mark and Diane had pasta which we all chose from time to time just to break things up.
Morning 2 of writing this entry:
Pottered down to the Plaza this morning for breakfast as I did yesterday. Breakfast here is as it has been for the last two weeks, almost without exception, and that is, coffee, orange juice, bread and apricot jam. Here in what is now 'my' cafe, this is varied with fresh local goat's cheese which is fantastic with the jam, and the coffee is great and there's lots of it.
The Plaza is sweet and cobbled with gracious old trees and the high salmon coloured wall of the kasbah on one side, and one of the mountains looking spectacular just at the end of the street.
Each of the cafes has exactly the same menu, and even the same cloths but in different colours. I chose mine yesterday because the maitre d' just wandered out at exactly the right moment and got me. He seemed dour and quiet yesterday, but after sitting there for two hours with an excellent view of the building May Day celebrations, and a wonderful book, and breakfast followed by an additional cup of coffee and then a mint tea, I grew somewhat attached to the place. This morning, the next door guy was heading for me, but I saw my guy get up and when I looked at him and rejected his neighbour for his place, I nearly got a smile. And then, after breakfast was done, he actually came and chatted in very clear English. Like many Moroccans who deal with tourists, he seems to have some grasp of Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Berber, Spanish, French, English, German and possibly a little Japanese.
Moroccans are, generally, wonderful people, and it's very easy to be here. You mostly see men on the street of course. Women are nearly as invisible here as in India. And the men are as visible, apparently spending hours and hours and hours in cafes, apparently doing nothing. Usually they are not getting drunk - the hours are spent over coffee and mint tea and soft drinks. Kate and I set up a challenge to find a Moroccan woman in a cafe, and never achieved it. But, choosing wisely, we don't feel awkward in the places we go, and again, being older and not small, slim and blonde makes life generally much easier.
There is some hassling to go into shops and to buy, but they're pretty hopeless at it! It's way to easy to say no, so I feel like sending them off to India to get good at it - they'd sell more! However, it would be much worse for us tourists, so I won't. Apparently it all used to be much worse, but the tourist police were set up to protect us because people were being deterred from coming. It has worked. And while there is dealmaking and some ripoffs and bargaining is hard, fundamentally Moroccans are lovely, smiling people who love to have a chat and are exceptionally hospitable.
There are loads of birds around, constantly singing and chattering, although the only one I can name is the stork. There are way fewer animals than India (I miss the cows in the street), the most common of which is the donkey. They're everywhere, carrying heavy loads or hobbled and left. I find it harder to bear how some of them look that I did the animals in India; I'm not sure why. And even more than donkeys there are cats. There are a few dogs, well looked after pets, but apparently Mohommed said unfavourable things about them so there aren't very many. However, the Man loved cats so much that he had the part of his robe a cat was sitting on cut out rather than making it move. So they are everywhere, and so are their kittens, it being spring and all. In fact in this internet cafe there is a white cat and its tiny kitten, curled up around the mouse at the next computer.
To recap on the tour, the following is the first part. It is taking me way longer to cover this than I had hoped, but I want to remember lots of it, so this turns out to be installment one.
Marrakesh was a great experience, as was the train trip to Casa which took in desert, mountains and farms and gives me my first sense of how wonderful a country it is. Casa, however, is pretty horrible. It really is a white city, but the white is dirty and peeling, the architecture is dull and there's nothing much to see, except the Hassan II mosque, which is astonishing. Tour notes: Set on the Atlantic coast, the mosque was completed in 1993 after years of work by around 30,000 craftsmen. The mosque was the late king's most ambitious project and was funded by public subscription - all $800 million of it! Only the mosques at Mecca and Medina are bigger, while its 200-metre-high minaret is the tallest in the world.
What was really wonderful was to see Kate who arrived shortly after me in mid-afternoon of day 1. Great to see her particularly, and a friend from home generally!
On Day 2 we go to the Casa Mosque, then head to Rabat by train for a few hours, and then on to Meknes. This 3 cities in a day, plus the fact that I feel sick from mid-afternoon on til next morning, completely throw my sense of orientation and I spend the rest of the trip being confused about what happened and how it fitted together in this first part of the tour. And Moroccan cities are not particularly attractive, particularly the new parts. (Every city has a medina - or old town, a Ville Nouvelle - or new town, built by the French, and most have a kasbah - or old village - often including a palace, and a mellah - or Jewish quarter. It's interesting that there is only a small Jewish population now, not because of persecution during world war two, but because there was a voluntary exodus to Israel in the 40s.
That said, we have a great walk through the medina in Rabat and really enjoy our fish sandwiches (although I'm convinced that this is what makes me mildly sick, which annoys me given that I survived a month in India, and no one else gets sick at this time). We then go on to the most gorgeous place in Rabat, an old kasbah that is painted white and mediterranean blue and is perched on the Atlantic, and where we sit for ages in a pretty tiled cafe drinking mint tea and enjoying a cool breeze and the water.
The two hour trip to Meknes is interminable because the train is crowded and I feel dreadful, and at the hotel the others go out to dinner and I, blessedly, go to sleep.
Kate and I have a slow start the next morning, an amusing wander into the medina, and then meet the others for further medina-ing and camel burgers in a tiny, tiny little cafe. In fact the cafe just provides the mint tea and the table and chairs. The others have bought the meat at one stall and it is being cooked up and made into burgers at another. I refrain from the whole thing - it's too soon to be eating anything other than plain bread at this point.
After this, we travel by minibus to the ruins of Volubilis. We have a local guide to steer us around this "this ancient hilltop city, one of the Roman Empire's most remote bases, which remained affluent until the 18th century, long after the 200 year reign of the Romans had ended". The site itself really is amazing - a clearly visible ancient city - but we are also completely enchanted by the countryside which is stunningly green and pretty farmland, and by the 3' high storks' nests which are perched on top of two roman columns and which two stork families share with a mass of starlings. There are storks nests everywhere we go in fact - on top of mosque minarets, houses, power poles, and anything else high up and safe.
This journey is our first taste that there are large parts of Morocco, particularly in the north, that are green and fertile and outrageously pretty, and that they are broken up with spectacular land and mountain formations.
This is a key feature of the whole trip. The country is fabulous. It changes constantly, from area to area, and much of it gives me the sense that is is fantastically old, like Australia. It looks really weathered and worn down, and there are sections that look like mountains that have half fallen down, with the rest about to come down any minute. There are thrown sideways mountains like the Kimberly, and massive tabletops rising out of vast flat plains, and weathered round tops, and narrow passes that you can imagine being defended on horseback, mostly in black and white. And there are areas that are green all over, and then those places where the hillsides are rugged and rocky, but the river courses are lush, green palmeries, ie areas of crops and palm trees in shades of English green.
Through gorgeous country we get to Fes, the most intact medieval city in the Arab world. This has the only medina for which we need a guide from beginning to end because it is so labyrinthine. And we are told that if we lose our guide, or go in separately, to pay someone to get us out. The best part of the visit is the view from the old Merenid tombs on the hill. The colours of Fes are creamy and gorgeous (from a distance) and the city is surrounded by farmland and trees. Our big group of 12 is broken into 2 groups for the guided tour the day after arrival. Our little group gets the dud guide, ie the one for whom commission from the shop keepers is actually more important than what we want to do or learn about, and we are not convinced we are not being ripped off somewhat by her advice. However, it's a good day (a trip to the medina takes at least a full day). The pottery is fantastic and it's amazing to see the handcrafting, and particularly the laying out of the mosaic work. Some of us buy pottery and even carpets and some slippers, and I'm satisfied that I have got value for my money, regardless of whether I could have got it for less with more persistent bargaining or elsewhere.
Day 5 is around Midelt in the Middle Atlas Mountains - the territory made famous by the French Foreign Legion. Our route then takes us through cedar forests (very small it seems to me), home to the Barbary Apes (apparently, but not to be seen today), and into the valley between the Middle and High Atlas mountain ranges. We continue to Midelt, which is overlooked by the Djebel Ayachi, a 3700m peak.
Apart from the amazement of the scenery of the drive, I recall little of Midelt, except for the stunning colours of the town from the terrace of the restaurent, and the visit to Kasbah Myriam, a carpet and embroidery workshop run by Franciscan nuns with the aim of providing sustainable employment and healthcare to local Berber women. Kind of wish we'd held off on carpets until we got here...
Late in the afternoon, however, we have a spectacular walk to a rocky gorge and then on into a tiny local village and out through the fields dotting the track leading to our hotel. This is our first village visited and it is a new experience. The houses are made of local clay and straw and kind of piled on top of and around each other. Windows are tiny because houses are built around protected central courtyards and don't look out to the street. Walls are often straight with a mix of 300 year old timber doors and more recent metal ones. Some of the passage ways are so dark as to need a torch, and none are particularly well formed. And in a strong deluge, it all falls apart. It's impossible to get a sense of just how hard life is here. The land seems fertile, the people we see happy, the landscape is pretty as hell, the housing is cute but I wouldn't dream of living there, and family life is tucked away behind the walls, probably hard and frugal, but also communal and shared.
On Day 6 we are heading for the Sahara, a long drive but amazing. Along the way we stop for lunch and to buy scarves that will become turbans later. The last town along the way is
Merzouga which has grown into a flourishing city just supporting the desert tourist trade. We don't stop here but go off the main road and head to an auberge (guest house/hotel) on the edge of the desert proper where we leave our big packs and load onto the camels. From the auberge we can see the ruins of two other hotels, and a large lake, both the outcome of massive rains last year.
This is a much better camel experience than India. The camels are more comfortable somehow, and I feel more secure immediately. Way more important than that, however, is that we are almost immediately in real desert dunes. They are absolutely beautiful and very peaceful, and pretty much straight out of the movies and calendars we have all seen. We are led along by two blue berber men - they always wear blue - who navigate our way through identical looking dunes.
We arrive at a camp that is three low tents set around a central rug. Beds are mattresses on the ground in the tents; food in tagines miraculously appears from the Berber family tents nearby; and our exercise is an absolutely killing, but very satisfying, hike straight up the side of an enormous dune that doesn't appear ever to stop rising.
The group I am here with comprises: four teacher friends from Melbourne - Lyn, Diane, Noelene and Sandra - in their late 50s and 60s; 40-something friends Jacquie (Kozminski's) and Liz (cinema/tv ad director); Swiss Daniel (35), German Marco (35) and Yvonne (30), NZ Sarah (29), and Kate and me, plus our tour leader, Rachel, who is only 23. Despite some doubts in the beginning, we are sorting ourselves out and getting on well and the friendships that develop among us all are yet more proof to me that age is a very minor determinent of friendship.
I'm going to leave it there for the moment, and fill in the rest in the next installment. Same bat channel...
