Beautiful Chefchaouen

On Wednesday, we had a full day to explore Chefchaouen and the surrounding countryside. Chefchaouen is a small mountain city in the Rif mountains. As I mentioned before, a lot of the town is painted in various shades of blue, especially in the medina (old city). The whole town is on a hillside so there are lots of stairs and windy, steep roads. The hotel there was adorable - no heat but lots of fireplaces and decorated entirely (of course) in blue.

We set out in the morning with the intention of going for a hike to a nearby national park, hopefully stopping in the mountain village of Kalaa, which looked to be in the middle of the park.

Pretty much as soon as we walked out of the hotel, we were lost, and spent some time wandering the medina trying to reach the road that would lead us to the park. Luckily, wandering the medina is not a miserable activity since it's beautiful and fun.

[click pictures to view larger version] 

Wandering did mean a lot of stairs though!

Chefchaouen has a lot of waterfalls that run through town - here is one of them:

After admiring the waterfalls and continuing to climb up and up through the medina, we finally reached the top.

We set off down the road towards the national park. At one point, we actually had to walk through a driving school which was apparently being conducted on one section of road. We found the sign for the national park and followed the dirt road/path into the park.

At first, things were not especially promising. In Morocco, apparently "national park" and "landfill" are synonymous terms, and as we hiked through the landfill and sketchy Moroccan men tried to sell us hash, I mostly was looking around for a rock large and pointy enough to kill Scott with the first blow. (This hike was his idea).

However, once we got through the sketchy part, we were eventually left alone and we were rewarded with some amazing views:

The path varied from an actual dirt road to a more narrow path, and we frequently passed sheep grazing and men plowing the soil with teams of donkeys. We weren't sure if we were ever going to reach Kalaa but there was a kid about 100 yards ahead of us who was going SOMEWHERE, so we sketchily followed him through the mountains.

It began to get quite warm and the sun was feeling quite hot on our faces. [I did wind up getting a little sunburned but it had faded by the next morning.] Every time we went around a bend, I hoped we would see a town but instead it would just be more uphill path.

We finally caught sight of a village and headed for it. I drank from a mountain stream, which helped refresh me a lot. We were really hoping there would be someplace for us to eat in town.

We were happy to find this building:

If may be tough to see in the picture but it says "Cafe" on the bottom left hand side, above the door. We headed for it, visions of delicious tangines and couscous filling our imaginations. (Or maybe just my imagination.) We arrived at the same time as a group of French hikers, and were escorted to sit in plastic chairs next to a stream. They brought out tea and water, and we suggested that we would like to eat.

We discussed this with the proprietor through a variety of translators - we talked to the French woman, who would translate it into French for her husband, who then repeated it in Arabic to the cafe owner. After this slightly ludicrous exchange, the cafe owner disappeared for a moment, and then returned and beckoned us to come inside.

He brought us to a room and we sat on sheep skins, and he brought us some lunch. This lunch consisted of: a giant bowl of olives, a giant bowl of sliced tomatoes, and a giant bowl of olive oil. And bread.

I don't know that this picture does justice to the scale of this whole thing - when the bowl of olive oil was set down, I momentarily thought that it was a bowl of soup or broth, there was so much of it. We went to work on this, although I wasn't a huge help on the olive consumption front and absolutely NO help with eating the tomatoes. Luckily I put in a good effort on the bread and olive oil.

While we were eating, the cafe owner's son talked to us for a few minutes and showed us his English exercise book from school. He claimed to be 27 years old, which mostly makes me think that his teacher needs to review numbers with them more because he looked like he was about 13 or 14.

The lunch and giant bottles of water refreshed us enough to face the hike back to Chefchaouen. By this time, it was around 2:30 PM, and the shadows were already starting to lengthen from the mountain.

We mostly followed the same road back, although we eventually deviated and wandered on a slightly different, smaller path which shortened the distance somewhat and allowed us to bypass the landfill. We eventually arrived back in Chefchaouen, and I rested my feet for a bit before we went and got a big, filling dinner - though we both groaned when the server set down the inevitable bowl of olives.

Yesterday morning, we left Chefchaouen and had a very long day traveling to Marrakesh, where we are at the moment. I will post about Marrakesh tonight or first thing tomorrow, since we will soon go and spend a few nights in the desert!! (and I don't think the Berber tents have wi-fi.)