17 April Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen is a really nice place, quite unlike anywhere else we have seen in Morocco. It is a walled Medina town stuck onto a mountain side. That and the fact that everywhere is painted in a shade of blue makes it feel like a Cyclades Island town. There is a central plateau but the rest of the town is either up or down some steps. Narrow streets with overhanging buildings twist and turn, with blind alleys leading off to houses up yet more steps. The contrast with the Medina in Fez could not be more startling. Everywhere is clean and well maintained. As we walked around this morning people were outside their houses, swilling down the walkways with buckets of water and brushing them clean. The walls, the steps, beside the alleys, they are all painted in varying shades of blue. Doorways are exquisitely tiled, and glimpses inside revealed stairs leading up and down to different levels of the hillside buildings with more beautiful tiling.
The people are unbelievably friendly and welcoming. Obviously as you walk around the shopping area the shop keepers are anxious to attract your attention and are very good at spotting which language to use, but there is no real hard sell. At least three complete strangers, two men and a woman came up to me and started a conversation, in Spanish and then in English. They were not shop keepers, they had nothing to sell. They asked where I was from, did I like Chefchaouen, did I like Morocco, and interestingly, which place in Morocco had I liked best. There is so much pride in the place where they live, maybe that is why they take such good care of it. I was asked if I had found everything I wanted, if I needed any help with anything. Then just goodbye, a wave, and enjoy your trip.
We walked out into the New Town area, not a place the tourists would go, and it was just as clean, larger litter bins, just like our giant wheelie ones in England, on every street, and people using them. Like most of the New Town areas, there were wide boulevard like avenues with trees and flowers bordering them. We also walked round the back of the New Town, where there were streets of more basic housing, some not in such good repair, rusty iron work and peeling paint, but it was still clean.
We followed the course of the river to where there was a place for communal washing and today must have been carpet washing day. Groups of people had enormous carpets they were washing and scrubbing in the fast flowing water and then dragging up to dry on the rocks. There were small waterfalls and cascades coming from the mountain sides to join the main river. We made a good decision to stay the extra day in Fez and take advantage of the facilities of Dar Mystere, while it rained. We learnt that it had been raining very hard here for several days as well, until yesterday. It would not have been so comfortable here. Somebody (another friendly person) explained to us that they don't usually get so much heavy rain this late on in the year, but that they had been really pleased about it. It has been a very dry winter and the concentration of minerals in the reservoir water is too high and it would not have been good for the agriculture or animal husbandry the area relies upon. The fruit and vegetables for sale here look wonderful, so fresh and luxuriant.
There were lots of people about today (Moroccan and presumably mainly local). Evidently 2 weeks national holiday period started yesterday, the schools are closed. We hope it doesn't mean that accommodation in the coastal resorts will get booked up. We have decided to head off to the Atlantic Coast tomorrow. We had intended to go back to Marrakesh down the spine of the country, taking in some of the places we missed out when we went east to go to the desert, or drove through in snowstorms. We had planned to go through Meknes and Azrou, but since we have been in Chefchaouen we have decided that we don't really want to go back to any large cities. This often happens to us, maybe it is why we travel so well together, we disagree with each other much less when we are travelling than we do when we are at home. One of us has a thought, like 'I don't really want to spend anymore time in large urban areas', and before the sentence is completed the other one says, 'that's exactly what I was going to say'. So we have had a change of plan, yet again, and are heading for the coast instead, and picking smaller places as we go, luckily we should be able to do that with the car. The only concern, as I said, is that if lots of Moroccans are taking their holidays they might all decide to go to the coast. We will see.
How's this for a contradiction, we will also go to Casablanca. We had decided not to, too big, too many people. We have had another think, and decided that it is an important part of Morocco and we mustn't be so 'sniffy' just because we try to stay off the tourist trails. We will however find somewhere to stay outside. We've had a look and there seems to be a very good train service along the coast for about 50 kilometres in either direction. So the current plan is to find a nice, smallish place to stay for a couple of nights where we can leave the car and take a train in.
Also we hope it will be a bit warmer at the coast. The mountains are colder than we expected for mid April, especially at night.