So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O’er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy:
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy,
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown
Henry van Dyke, Life
Chefchaouen to Tangier: No Matter Where I Go
They call Chefchaouen the Blue City because it is like a small lake of indigo paint burst its dam and flooded the streets. When we arrived, it seemed they had scarcely waited for yesterday’s coat to dry before they slapped on another one, and sometimes our toes would sink in by accident or we would slip and bunch up several layers of it.
I am also sure they could match every pound of blue paint with a pound of “magic dragon”. Marijuana, often distilled into hashish, is grown almost fearlessly, though illegally, in the surrounding mountains. There were more than a few yellow fingered entrepreneurs who were anxious for us to try theirs, or even to take a tour of their farm, at a “special deal just for you my friend” price. The Moroccan government seems to be opportunistic, enforcing enough only to keep up appearances. In the big cities, they take it seriously, but up in the mountains, far away from any official government business, they are mostly willing to live and let live.
That magical city was a breath of fresh mountain air. We spent those few days hiking, eating to our hearts’ content, reading, and loitering around the city streets or by the river, which doubled as a community swimming hole and a laundromat. The people were very relaxed, and lived a quiet life relative to the loud, manic one we had seen in Marrakech. Old men with long beards sat around in their traditional pointy hooded djellabas, smoking cigarettes, and often starting conversations with passersby. The old women swept their porches or sat and gossiped together while watching over their grandchildren while the parents were working. At night, I would walk alone on the steep-stepped alleys and get lost in a world that seemed like it came from J.K. Rowling’s imagination. One of these nights, a French couple and I had stopped to look at a painting on an easel, and were invited inside by the middle-aged painter for a mint tea, and we talked for what seemed like hours. The Frenchman and the artist began to argue about religion, while the artist became increasingly more inebriated from a bottle of rum (the first alcohol I had seen in the country) and a joint. I eventually left, but it was the first in depth conversation I had with anyone other than Mahmoud. He did not pressure me into buying his art. He just wanted to talk.
The next day, the Almighty Spreadsheet demanded we move along, so back down the Rif mountains we went, and then to massive city of Fes.
I had booked the hotel outside of the medina, thinking we would need a rest from all the hoopla. But this ended up only causing the hassle of having to wait for and haggle with taxis there, because it is the main attraction of the city (it is massive, several times larger than the one in Marrakech).
For a first time visitor, it probably requires a guide, and on our first day there, we asked our hotel for one, gave them our price, and they reserved it. A driver arrived in a van a while later, and we drove to one of the gates of the city to pick up our guide, who promptly showed us official Moroccan guide credentials, and listed off some of his biggest clients he had taken for tours. He took us to the outside of the Kairaouine mosque (we peaked inside as much as we could, but non-Muslims are not allowed into mosques), the royal palace, the tanner’s quarter (which was non-operational due to preservation work by UNESCO), a large potter’s shop, and a number of the city’s ancient gates. The problem was that the guide was not getting paid what he wanted, and he tried to make up for that by taking us into a restaurant and some shops that charged us nearly three times what everything was worth (apparently some tour guides strike deals with local restaurants and shops and they take a cut of whatever tourists, usually ignorant of the normal price, buy). After we did not buy anything and then offended him by refusing to buy his lunch, he was silent except when we pried an explanation of what we were seeing out of him. At the end, we paid him as passive aggressively as possible (“What is this coin again? Oh yes, well that won’t be enough. How about this one? Sorry we’re just stupid Americans.”). Our driver, who I believed to be an owner of the tour company, apologized profusely after we told him the story, and offered us a deal if we would like to take a longer tour the next day with a different guide. I had priced the tour he was offering the day before, and he was indeed offering us a good deal. We also did not care to spend much more time in Fes, so we took him up on it. We later ate camel burgers in the medina at a trendy cafe. Having had ominous clouds bearing down on us the last half of the day, we looked up the weather and discovered that it was going to rain torrentially all the way up through Spain for the next week. We were happy to have a tour mostly in the car.
The next day, a polite driver, a different one from the day before, met us at the hotel, and assured us before we took off that we would not be pressured to buy anything. On the drive out, we stopped at several police stop points and handed over our documents. Our driver informed us that the police also hide behind bushes and trees with radars frequently, and that the speed limits are set so low that everyone has to speed to make it anywhere, so they use hand signals to communicate with each other about where the police stop points and hiding places are (it is illegal to flash their lights to do so). The rain began during the drive, and by the time we made it to Volubilis, a ruined Roman trading city, it was pouring. I still laugh at a picture of Jenn who could not even fake a smile, she was so uncomfortable. We ate lunch in Meknes, though we did not get to see much of it except a small souk. The next stop was the green tinted holy city of Moulay Idriss, located in steep foothills. We stopped in a little square. Our driver told us how to get to a lookout point to see the tomb better. Then, in a very Moroccan way, gave us two discordant pieces of information as if they were one coherent point: 1.) to be respectful, as this was the most holy city in Morocco, and 2.) to not trust anyone, as some locals liked to mislead tourists on purpose away from the lookout point, then demand money to lead them back to where they began. By the time I got back into the van half an hour later, I had broken both his stipulations.
The first I broke by accident on our way up some steps into the city when a man launched toward me, huffing and grinding his teeth and pushed my camera away from my face with such violence, I was afraid he had broken its strap. “No photo! No photo!” he yelled. “Do not take photos of Muslim women!” Then he turned back, ranting to one of his friends (I did not have to be fluent in Arabic to know that it was probably about ignorant, disrespectful tourists). Now, in my defense I had learned about this on my first day in Morocco, and had made a point of following that guideline. Apparently, I had inadvertently captured a woman in my photograph, but nothing like this had happened to me yet.
The second, we both broke after getting lost trying to get to the supposed lookout point. We thought we were being clever by asking an old woman for directions, rather than any of the young boys or teenagers who were the typical troublemakers. She led us up the steep, wet, foggy, winding streets, until the only thing we only knew was that we were higher up than where we started. She eventually stopped by a small house and called inside. A young boy came out to take us the rest of the way, and it was then that we realized that she too was in on the troublemaking. I was angry at myself at how much I was still not getting right about this country. I eventually found the way down to the van using my newly acquired navigation skills. The driver definitely gave me a “told-you-so” speech.
When we arrived back at the hotel, we discovered it had not rained much in Fes and that it would not for the evening. We took advantage of this, spending the night eating tajines outside next to a friendly couple from France, and in a souk buying trinkets for our friends and family (and a pair of sandals for Jenn), judging everything by whether it was small enough to carry in our bicycle bags.
The next day we took a bus to rainy Tangier, where we stayed in a Victorian era French hotel. Tangier was more like a European city than we had yet seen. There was the old medina (much of it painted white), but the newer part, from the French colonial days, felt like a neighborhood in Paris, albeit probably dirtier. We ate our first seafood dinner of the trip, then it stopped raining for a bit so we walked to the beach. There were swanky cafes and five-star restaurants all along the way. This was a side of Morocco I had not yet seen.
I began to think back a little. I was frustrated with how little I understood. Every time I thought I had gained perspective, Morocco found a way of turning it upside down (like following the old woman in Moulay Idriss only to find she had led us astray). I could only get real answers to my questions from Mahmoud and an inebriated artist in Chefchaouen, and even then there was still so much that was left a mystery. But then again, I had not come to Morocco knowing the language, or with enough time to get to know anyone very personally. It would be unfair to expect to get that deep into somewhere considering that, especially somewhere so different from my own. And anyways, I was leaving with far more insight into their culture and religion than I had come with. Plus, I had gained a sense of direction and gotten pretty good at negotiating. Yes, I had been a tourist, and I would be a tourist in some sense no matter where I went, but I was going to learn from everywhere I went, and experience as much as I could. I looked north, where Europe awaited me across the water. I wanted to make good memories, and I was not going to give in to regret. I had done too much of that, and it was time for a change. I vowed that no matter where I would go, I would be here.
Before I went to sleep that night, I discovered that a red mark on my shoulder from my duffel bag strap had spread into a long strip of burst blood vessels down my chest and upper back. I had to accept the truth: I might have somewhat overpacked. The next day, I lugged my somewhat-overpacked luggage to the ferry, and sailed the foggy, stormy Strait of Gibraltar for Spain. The engines fired up, and I walked out to the back of the ship where all the exiled smokers sucked down their carcinogens. As Tangier grew more and more opaque in the distance, I would sometimes think I had lost it, but some part of it would peak out of the fog. Then at last I blinked, and Africa disappeared. After a short time, a dock came seemingly out of nowhere, and I found myself in another city. But this one was on a new continent in a different world.