Travels Within Morocco: Chefchaouan

Last weekend, after the Prophet’s Birthday, a small group of us went to the city of Chefchaouan, also known as the Blue City. It was absolutely amazing. This city is set in the valley of the Rif Mountains so it is completely surrounded by gorgeous landscapes. It is called the Blue City because many of the walls and buildings in the medina are painted this brilliant shade of blue. For more information on the history of the city itself visit Tiffany’s blog here:Tiffany's Blog. I am going to focus on the travel aspect of our adventure because traveling within Morocco is not always easy and other people may want to learn from our mistakes.

There is no direct train or bus to get from Meknes to Chefchaouan. You can take the train to Fez and then a bus to Chefchaouan, but that requires knowing the bus schedule before you get to Fez. In the US, something like that would probably be posted online, but we’re in Africa. We’re lucky they had a website at all. So to get there, we ended up taking a Grand Taxi. It cost 1,000 Dirhams to take the 4 hours taxi ride to Chefchaouan whether we had 2 people in the taxi or 6. We ended up having 4 people, which worked out well because even though they say there’s room for 6 there’s really only room for 4. This worked out to 250 Dirhams per person, a little expensive by Moroccan standards (roughly $32) but still not bad.

Laura, the ISA director, warned us that when we get out of the taxi we will be bombarded by people offering us “help.” They will say “Oh, my cousin has a hotel, let me show you the way!” or “My brother’s restaurant, it’s very good, very cheap, I will take you.” Then they expect you to pay them for walking you to where ever.  You have to be very forceful with these people when you tell them no or else they will follow you and keep asking. Don, another ISA student, was the only boy with us, which worked out well for us girls, but maybe not so well for him. Most of the people would defer to him to answer their questions and offer him help since he was the man and obviously in charge. After about 10 minutes though, we finally made our point and were left alone.

We briefly stopped for lunch and then made our way to the hotel so we could ditch our bags and look a little less like tourists. Although, when you’re a group of white kids, people just kind of assume. They assume that you are a tourist and that you have money.

We borrowed two guide books from the ISA office, Frommers and Lonely Planet, which were very helpful in finding the right hotel and giving us ideas for what to do in the area. We ended up staying in Hotel Marrakech and I highly recommend it. None of the hotels in Morocco are up to American/Western standards. You kind of have to lower your expectations a bit when traveling in Morocco. So when I say that it was a good hotel, I mean that it had a normal toilet and friendly staff. The main draw to this hotel was that it was decorated to match the city. So everything was blue! The bed covers, the curtains, the walls; all were bright blue. It was very peaceful and relaxing. The guy who runs the hotel was very nice and very understanding of our language barriers. The hotel offers many different room options, the cheapest for us worked out to be one room with one double bed and one twin bed for the three of us girls and one room with one double bed for Don, a total of 508 Dirhams. All four of us split the cost so that it was equal for everyone, 127 Dirhams each(roughly $16 for one night). This came with breakfast, our own bathroom (which does not come standard in all hotels or even all of the rooms in this hotel) and hot water. Our bathroom did have a shower, but it was a little strange. And by a little, I mean a lot. It had seven different shower heads, all at different heights, and when you turned the knob, they all turned on spurting water everywhere. This would be somewhat ok if the shower had its own space, but it doesn’t. It is just on the wall, in between the sink and the toilet, with a drain in the middle of the room. So to take a shower you more or less have to sit on the toilet. We all just decided to skip showering that night because we didn’t want to flood the bathroom. 

Something else to note about Chefchauan, it is the marijuana capital of Morocco. This was something we found out about two hours into our taxi ride by reading the guide books. The Rif Mountain area has a huge cannabis farm industry that supplies most of Europe with its pot. This is where the word reefer comes from, the Rif valley. One of the guide books mentions that anyone who looks “slightly alternative” will be offered hashish and/or marijuana. We turned this into our catch phrase for the weekend, constantly deciding who and what was slightly alternative and who was not. We were offered quite a few times, possibly because “slightly alternative” means young white tourist, and even though we found the offers very humorous (you like some good marijuana???) we declined. The town definitely has a large hippy culture, so if that’s your thing definitely make a stop. But keep in mind that they are generally the same everywhere. You won’t really be getting a taste of Moroccan culture by staying in the hippy areas of Chefchaouan.

The rest of the time in Chefchaouan went pretty smoothly. We found good places to eat, met some very nice people, hiked up a mountain trail, and shopped in the medina. Oh and took lots and lots of pictures (I took about 180 which I thought was a lot until Tiffany told me she had close to 400). It wasn’t until it was time to go home that we ran into travel problems.

You may or may not have heard about the protests in Morocco. They aren’t very big, very violent, or very revolutionary so the media hasn’t really been paying attention. But they still impacted the country. Protests were scheduled for Sunday Feb. 20^th ; the day that we had planned to be traveling back to Meknes. Our plan was to take the bus to Fez, and from Fez we would take the train to Meknes. The bus ride was fine, longer than expected but still fine. We got off the bus in Fez and immediately things go awry. We are approached by two men, who say they work for the bus station, and want to help us get a taxi. We don’t believe them because a. they are not wearing uniforms(although now that I think about it, unless you are the police no one here as uniforms) and b. we were approached by a lot of people in Chefchaouan who wanted to “help.” Turns out these guys were legit though. Because of the protests the trains were not running so we couldn’t get on the train to Meknes. We were also informed that there were lots of people in the streets and as foreigners it would even be dangerous to try to get to the train station. So we were pretty much stuck with whatever help these guys could give us. One of the men, who spoke pretty good English, went outside and organized a taxi ride to Meknes for us. The taxi driver didn’t speak any English so in the end I’m glad this man helped us. We paid a total of 500 Dirhams for the ride 45 minute ride to Meknes. Anyways, lesson learned, do not make travel plans on a national day of protest.

This taxi ride provides the perfect opportunity to introduce you all to certain aspects of Moroccan life; constant government control and bribing the police. All along the highway and any intercity roads there are police stationed. Any one of them can decide at any point in time to make you pull over. They can have any reason at all. Maybe you are a guy and you are driving a female friend home, they will pull you over and ask why you have a woman in your car. I was surprised that our taxi on the way to Chefchaouan made it the entire way without getting stopped. We weren’t so lucky on the way back. Taxis and buses all have different types of licenses that authorize where they are allowed to drive. It turns out that our taxi driver was only authorized to drive in Fez, so we got pulled over as we neared Meknes. They asked him what he was doing, why he was in Meknes, even though they knew he was a taxi driver and that he was probably taking customers to where they needed to go. The police demanded money to let him continue. Our driver paid them 20 Dirhams and was allowed to continue on his way. Bribing the police is so normal that the police expect it. This happens to be one of the things that people were protesting. Government corruption is so bad that it has trickled down all the way to the traffic cops. I can’t even imagine offering a bribe to a police officer in the US let alone having them expect it of me.

The driver, after paying the police, got in the car and started to explain the situation to us. It was at this point that he discovered I could speak a little bit of Arabic. After that he talked to me for a bit, complimented my limited Arabic skills, and asked about our stay in Meknes. Finally after 4 hours of bus ride and 45 minutes of taxi we had made it back to Meknes. We were all so exhausted, all we wanted to do was get home, check our email, and go to bed. Too bad we found out we had no internet as soon as we got there.

It hasn’t been too bad without the internet though. Tiffany and I have both realized how dependent we are on the internet and that it might be good for us to not have unlimited access. We’ve been going to the Marilyn Café which has free wifi and to the ISA office to use the internet. It gets us out of the house for a bit and prevents us from constantly being online.

I know many of you are interested in the crazy revolution trend that is sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. I will be writing about this soon, I just need to work out exactly what I’m going to say. Just to put minds at ease, the situation in Morocco is nowhere near as chaotic, dangerous, or revolutionary as that in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya. The people of Morocco generally like their king and his rule, but they want to make some changes, some constitutional amendments. This is vastly different than wanting to throw out the entire government altogether. Moroccans enjoy a large number of freedoms that the people in those countries do not. The Moroccan government even approved the protests saying that it supports the people’s right to protest peacefully and to voice their opinions.