9/16 – Bus to Chefchaouen

Today we left Casablanca at 9am and headed north to the Rif Mountains and Chefchaouen, where we will stay the next 3 nights.  The land is much flatter than we had anticipated, and largely agricultural. The primary crops we saw were cane sugar, corn, and sourgum. There were also lots of sheep, but very few dogs to assist with herding. Dogs are considered unclean and not kept in the house or as pets, whereas cats are considered to be clean and can stay in houses. We saw maybe 3 dogs all day long, none in the company of a person.

The main irrigation is the concrete aquaducts built by the French during their occupation from 1914 to 1956. The French also built bridges and the railroad system. We saw a lot of building projects along the way that had been started, but completion dates are apparently a mystery, and many project had no apparent effort underway.

Before grinding

For lunch, we stopped in a small town and had a traditional meal, a tagine of vegetables and beef followed by a lamb kabob made with freshly ground meat. We watched the butcher pull lamb out of the fridge and cut it in large chunks, add a roughly sliced onion, a handful of cilantro and some paprika which he tossed into a grinder and handed off to the chef. The kabob was not grilled on sticks, but the ground lamb was gathered up into small sausage-like shapes and put on a 2 sided grill pan like you might use to grill fish.

Ready to grill

Jim checks out the tagine

The tagine had been cooking for some some before we got there – mid-sized clay pans with conical covers set over charcoal contained a layer of beef on the bottom, followed by cut up potatoes, and then sticks of carrot, green pepper, and small zuchini’s stacked around the middle like the sticks to make a teepee fire. It was all wonderful. I am starting to worry about my plan to lose weight by going to a country where I don’t like the food, since nothing so far has been iffy.

The first view of "The Horns"

After lunch, our bus trip led into the hills we had seen from a distance and the terrain started looking a lot like northern California, we started seeing a lot of olive orchards. Late in the afternoon, we reached Chefchaouen, an old town set below two mountains called “The Horns”. We could see the city across a valley as we drove up, beautifully lit up by the afternoon sunshine. This part of Morocco was occupied by Spain in the past and also housed people fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, so it has a bit of a different look and feel from the rest of the country. The buildings are white and sea blue and looked wonderful from a distance. We are staying in a converted multi-generational home in the center of the old town, and we could see the city wall from our vantage point.

The tree in the upper center marks where we are staying.

When we arrived, we were prevented from going close to the hotel because of the expected arrival of some important person, so we got a bit more of a walk uphill thru the alleys of the old town than anticipated. In the street complexity, it reminded me of Lijiang in China, with all its winding lanes, and I wonder how we will find our way around when we are let loose tomorrow afternoon! Our hotel, in keeping with its home-like flavor, doesn’t have a name on it or even a house number. EEK! We have a lovely large room with a sitting area and private bathroom, looking out over the hotel outdoor terrace on one side.

Central courtyard of our hotel

View from our room

The room itself