Waking up in Tangier, Anna and I knew we had a bit of a morning ahead of us: we wanted to get to Chefchaouen; we had no idea how we were going to do so. Anna expressed a preference for renting a car, but because there was no way she was going to drive in downtown Tangier, and because a rental was likely to be a manual transmission, that meant it’d be my second time on the trip dealing with the stress of driving in an unfamiliar city while not knowing the rules of the road or where we were going. And after nearly four weeks of travel, fatigue was definitely setting in. I just wasn’t sure I was up for it.
So we identified the possibilities: a private taxi (according to the concierge, dh$700, or US$90, each way). Sharing a taxi (US$15 each way, but six people per mid-70’s mercedes sedan). Bus (US$4, but much longer trip duration, plus finding the bus station and arranging tickets). Anna had found that renting a car would be about US$200 for the full three days we were in Morocco, and would of course give us a lot more flexibility.
After pondering a bit, I opted to rent/drive. I wasn’t entirely in the mood for it, but it seemed like the best price/performance option, and it would simplify all subsequent travels in Morocco, whereas the other options meant dealing with transport again when we wanted to move on from Chefchaouen. So we set about renting a car from one of the many agencies within a block or two of our hotel.
And now, for the second time, my conscious decision to leave my driver’s license at home turned out to have been a mistake. And, whereas in Jordan it hadn’t been a problem (“just tell them you left it at the rental agency!”), the vibe from the place we talked to here in Tangier was much more serious. It couldn’t be done.
The prospect of still having to fall back on one of the more sub-optimal transport strategies apparently spurred some brain cells that hadn’t been active in Jordan, and I remembered that I had scanned copies of pretty much all of my documents stored handily in a Subversion repository that I could get to remotely. So, yes, I used the very expensive AT&T data roaming feature of my iPhone to score a copy of my Washington State driver’s license over the Internet in Tangier. Yes, I’m a geek.
So, armed with a digital copy of my driver’s license, we rented our little Renault Clio and headed off towards Chefchaouen. Or, to be more precise, once we got all of the windows down to ventilate the car, which smelled suspiciously like some kind of dead animal had been left in it to rot for weeks, we headed in the general direction we believed Chefchaouen to be.
The drive itself was fairly uneventful, unless you count a fair amount of passing on corners in mountainous regions or Morocco’s inexplicable traffic circles that have two lanes entering on each side, but which the traffic circle is only one lane across. Still, we made it to Chefchaouen in a couple of hours with no actual contact with other cars, and having survived the foul odor that permeated our car.
Once in Chefchaouen, we stopped at the hotel we were hoping to stay at, a gorgeous little place that came highly recommended via the Internet. Unfortunately, all 12 of its rooms were full, and we ended up at the nearby Hotel Lobar which, like everything else in this city, is blue.
Now, when I say everything in this city is blue, I don’t mean that the city has some cute theme where there’s a favorite color that symbolizes the city. I mean, everything is blue. The houses. The furniture. The tile. The ceilings. The doors, arches, walkways, light fixtures, electric outlets, toothpicks. Everything is blue. It’s like that scene from the underrated John Carpenter film Mouth of Madness where the writer confides that his favorite color is blue and the P.I. wakes up on a greyhound bus with blue seats, with everyone on it dressed entirely in blue, sitting next to an old woman with blue hair. It’s that blue.
And it is impressive looking. I was going to write “cute”, but there’s an OCD quality to the effect that’s more imposing than cute. The single-mindedness with which this one color has been applied to an entire city is well worth seeing, and the city itself seems great, but there’s an overwhelming and almost oppressive feel. If you’ve been to Eastern Europe and traveled through the soulless expanses of concrete buildings, it’s kind of like that. Except Chefchaouen has done the entire city in blue rather than depressing grey.
Right, enough about the blue, for now at least. Other notable things in the city are the waterfall and steam that come down from the mountain and run through a ravine just south of the city. It’s a pretty good stream, and it flows through a fantastic square that is a combination washing area, swimming area, very wet soccer (futbol) field, and social center. It’s pretty amazing. In the afternoon, there were huge crowds of people, with some children and teens leaping from the walkway’s walls to the swimming pool, which looked both fun and a little scary, with jumps between 8 and 20 feet to a pool of water that’s not all that big, and maybe five feet deep at most.
We spent the afternoon wandering the Medina area, then heading down into the more modern part of town to hit an ATM and look at plans for tomorrow. No real plans yet, but we did eat dinner in a very cool small Moroccan place where Anna got Tajine of chicken and I got some wonderfully tasty kabobs. Anna’s stomach medications seem to be working, as she’s almost never in pain now, though she’s still not as spry as usual. And towards the end of the day I found myself feeling a bit off and with less energy than usual, which hopefully is just the fatigue from so many weeks traveling in new and foreign cultures.