Chefchaouen – the Blue City and to Friends Everywhere

As we left Marrakech by train headed to Rabat, we tried to stay in the moment. It would have been easy to spend the travel day reminiscing about Marrakech. We were in a train car that was divided into cabins of six people. We were seated across from each other. Our first stop was Casablanca. For this leg, we were reminded of what good train etiquette involved by the woman sitting next to Susanne. She spent the entire trip, either on her phone talking or talking to the woman on the other side of her. All of this chatter while the rest of us were also listening to her text notifications pinging loudly from her phone at a rate of about one every minute. We were all relieved when she got off in Casablanca.

She was replaced by a young gentleman, who I don’t think anyone knew, but he quickly connected with the other gentleman in the middle seat across from him and they spent the entire trip from Casablanca to Rabat talking. As the train got louder so did the conversation. The entire train trip was filled with other people’s chatter. We had not encountered this on our other European trains, but it has been a long time since we’ve seen the six-seat cabin configuration. When we stepped off of the train and onto the platform in Rabat, we took a moment to pause and let the loud passing-train noise offer us some solitude.

The word of the day is Friends. 

We had just ridden a train across land that reminded us of west Texas or New Mexico. Small towns that were few and far between. A reminder of how hard life can be in some places. But also a reminder that the people in those towns have hopes and dreams too. They also know happiness and joy. A hard life is not an unhappy 'woe is me' life.

The semi-desert turned into rolling hills and as we approached the Atlantic coast, the brown slowly turned to green. Obviously not the green of a rain forest, but the green of a central Texas spring.  

As we rolled through Casablanca and into Rabat, we commented on the newness of buildings. At Casablanca, we noticed a high-speed train at the station servicing the coast from Casablanca to Tangier. There is a lot of excitement for the 2030 World Cup football. There is also a lot of infrastructure construction underway. This will be the first time a World Cup has been hosted across two continents, by three countries, Morocco, Spain, and Portugal. Judging from the large number of incomplete buildings under construction, construction management did not appear to be Morocco’s strength.

In Rabat, we transferred from train to bus. Taking a cab to the bus station ended up being an inconvenience. There is a new football stadium being built that rivals any American professional football stadium. That gives you an idea of the magnitude of the construction. They had the roads closed and dropped people off about three-quarters of a mile from the bus station and we were left to walk. There was a shortcut that had been created by industrious people that went up a 30-degree hill in dirt. With pulling our luggage, that did not seem like a good option. We walked around the road with Malcolm glued to Google maps and Susanne providing all the necessary expletives to make sure everyone understood how she felt about it. Fortunately for all of you, we have neither audio nor video. 

We had not expected all the trains and buses to run on time all the time, but we never encountered a delay. On the Moroccan buses, the first few rows are reserved seating, and the rest of the bus is open seating, unless some Moroccan had decided that the your reserved seat was his seat and willing to argue with the driver about it. If you are lucky, as we were, to catch a half-empty bus, we gave up our assigned seats and went to the middle where each of us took two seats side-by-side. It made the five-hour bus ride tolerable. We also happened to sit next to a nice young man who spoke perfect English. He was from Morocco, but had lived in London for the last 15 years and he translated the bus driver’s announcements for us. This was important when you had a 25-minute stop to know it was 25 minutes.

In many ways, this bus ride through the countryside was one of the most memorable five hours of our journey. We were taking pictures, many never to be seen again, only to force us to frame and focus on what we saw in front of us. As we left Rabat, the capitol of Morocco, we could see the houses indicating a stronger middle class than we saw in other cities. We saw office buildings, shopping centers, and multi-lane roads. As we drove further into the rural areas, the color turned from the browns of the desert to the greens of the mountains. 

This bus ride gave us time to think and observe. The countryside was agricultural. We observed the irrigation that involved concrete troughs running beside the fields and dumping into the fields themselves. Shepherds were tending their flocks of sheep and cattle. There were no fences, so the tending was a full-time job. The donkey has a special place in Moroccan history. In fact, we learned that there is a museum in Tangier dedicated to documenting the role of the donkey in Moroccan history. We saw many donkey-drawn wagons used in the fields and for trips to town. The horse appeared to play a lesser role than in other countries and the donkey was the work-machine.

 

It was a Tuesday and all along the way, we saw children heading home from school. Girls in groups and boys in groups. Just like any other country trying to educate their kids for a better life. In fact, it was a theme we heard often from our hosts and guides, the desires for their children are for a better life and they know education is the key. Morocco was no different.

  

Here is a screen shot along the way of where we were headed. It is hard to believe that we are here in the northwest corner of Africa

We stopped at one bus stop for 25 minutes. They were cooking skewers of meat. It was also a meat market as you can tell from the pictures. We didn't ask how well the refrigeration worked on that cooler.

 

There are too many incomplete construction projects to count. It appears that maybe one out of every 10 buildings are in a state of suspended construction. In some cases, you can’t tell whether the building is going up or coming down. It could easily be the same type of title issue encountered in Marrakech. It could be the lack of construction workers. Many of the workers may have gone off to the Emirates and other Gulf countries that pay construction workers better than they can get here. Perhaps they have gone to work on the infrastructure project such as the stadium in Rabat. This is all conjecture on our part, but the observation still stands.  

 

We didn't get as good of an example as we would have liked, but here's a building with all of the concrete infrastructure done, a crane still up, but appears to have been stopped. Unexplainable.

As we arrived in Chefchaouen, we were thrown right back into the Marrakech-like culture. We asked a guy who looked like a tour guide who was meeting a couple of guests where to catch a taxi. His answer was ‘this guy’ can take you. A gentleman standing next to him grabbed our bags and we were off to our hotel. We got into his car, if you can call it that. There were holes in the floorboard and the door didn’t close all the way. You felt sorry for the motor straining as it tried to get up the hills. Susanne reached back to put her backpack up and swears she was bitten by something.  The ‘car’ struggled to make it up the hills to our lodging and again, we were dropped off outside of the Medina with a 10-minute walk to our hotel. Since it was all cobblestones, two enterprising men offered to carry our bags up to the hotel. At this point, we just said yes. It turns out that it was mostly uphill with a lot of steps and it was the right call.

Chefchaouen sits at the base of the mountains.

Our innkeeper, Othman, greeted us at the hotel with mint tea. Mint tea is the pride of Morocco. It’s what coffee is to Seattle. Not just a drink, but part of your culture. The hotel was inside of the Medina, and Malcolm was relieved, when shown to our room, to discover that there was a balcony, overlooking the entire hillside of Chefchaouen and far into the distance.     

The next morning we went upstairs to the rooftop to enjoy breakfast. We could see why they call it the “Blue City.” Many of the walls are painted blue and from the rooftop, there was literally a sea of blue below us. The reasons for this are cultural, religious and practical. The blue of the Mediterranean Sea. The blues for the Jewish people as opposed to the browns and greens of the Muslim culture. The practical being that the blue keeps it cooler, which keeps away the mosquitoes. I don’t think anyone knows exactly, but it is a beautiful sight.

These pictures are living proof that we are amateurs. We got great pictures from the rooftop but none of the beautiful rooftop. We did find this picture on the internet.

One thing we had forgotten to mention in Marrakech is the Islamic 'call to prayer.' If you have never been to a Muslim Country you may never have encountered it. In Islam there are five daily prayers. Five times a day the call to prayer is belted out from the mosque and Muslims are called to make the appropriate time-of-day prayer. When we say belted out from the mosque, it is likely that until the early 1900s, the call to prayer was done by one with the loudest voice from the top of the mosque's minaret. In more recent time, there are highly amplified, bullhorn speakers at the top of the mosques that do the heavy lifting. Five times a day we were reminded that we were in an Islamic culture and to take a minute to respect that culture. We had meant to make a recording of it and had failed to get a good one, but we found this one on the internet. 

Call to Prayer

Later in the morning, we met our guide and toured the medina. Some of the same typical stops such as the one at the carpet shop where they roll out 20 different carpets and promise that they can ship it to Rio Rancho before we get home. Or the skin oils that cure anything. Then there are the weavers and all the other craftspeople.

We learned a lot about the history of this area and the town in specific. The town was originally formed by Muslims and Jews who were refugees from Andalucía in Southern Spain during the inquisitions. Rather than convert to Catholicism, they escaped and moved to northern Africa. Thinking back to our time in Granada and Seville where the inquisitions were driving out the Muslims and Jews, and Queen Isabel was taking over the Alcazar and Alhambra, we could see how the pieces of the historical puzzle fit together. Some settled in Chefchaouen, including some of the military that realized that they could build a well-protected city on this mountain. And so they did. Ironically, the Spaniards were not the ones who came to conquer them, it was the Portuguese! But this walled city became the medina that now exists. This city was founded in the year 1492.  

Jews and Muslims had peacefully coexisted in Spain for many years. As they were electing to leave Spain, rather than convert to Catholicism, it is likely that they moved to northern Africa together. This evolution of Northern Morocco during this time was responsible for the almost 600 years of peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Jews in Morocco up to today. Morocco is officially a Muslim State. But its constitution also provides for freedom of religion and there are still many Jewish people living in Morocco. In addition, the constitution prohibits proselytizing of Muslims.

Here are some random shots through the Blue City - Chefchaouen. By the way, Chefchaouen literally translates to 'look at the horns' or 'look at the peaks.' That makes a lot of sense.

Indeed it is a colorful life!

A public fountain. People were filling their water bottles. The water was straight from a spring coming right out of the mountain above the city. 

As we returned from our tour, we were met by Othman. Sometimes in life you develop instant connections. Over the next two hours we discussed backgrounds, our families, and just about everything else. His hotel is his passion, but his home and his love is in Casablanca where his wife and two children are. He splits his time between them. We connected with an understanding of being gone for work.

Before becoming a hotelier, Othman was a professional photographer who traveled the world capturing photographs of people. We looked at some of the books of his photographs and at those covering the walls of the hotel and we're impressed by his ability to capture life being lived at all moments.

He talked about his daughter, age 7, who has been going to the American school in Casablanca and their son who is 4 and at the French school. Starting this fall, their daughter is transferring to the French school. What we found out is that English cursive and French cursive are composed of completely different movements of the hands, i.e., different motor skills. She is using tutors to teach her how to master the French cursive writing. We can only imagine how difficult it would be for one of us to learn to write cursive with a different pattern of writing. Imagine the language skills this young lady will have as she grows.

Susanne also got a chance to speak with Othman’s wife who happened to call. She is a successful independent accountant with a practice of her own in Casablanca. 

It is hard to describe what these connections mean. These close, but infrequent relationships you will carry with you for a lifetime. They are one of the reasons we travel. When you can be close to someone in a country 8,000 miles away and you begin to understand that they are just like you, then your entire worldview changes. Moroccans are not just a people in a far way country. They are people just like us. 

Ernest Hemingway said it brilliantly. "In our darkest moments. we don't need solutions or advice, What we yearn for is simply human connection..." It was anything but a dark moment, but the yearning is the same.

Thank you to Othman for accepting us into your life!

Here's to Friends! New ones, life long ones and all those we met in between!

And yes, a little sales pitch for Othman’s hotel, Le Petit Chefchaouen. If you ever get a chance to go to The Blue City, this is the place to stay. Our hearts were warmed by this connection.

 Here’s a link.

https://lapetitechefchaouen.ma/en/la-petite-chefchaouen/