Day Twenty-Eight dawned bright and early, but even before any dawning was done, we woke around 4:30am to the now-familiar overlapping and competing Adhan performances from the three or four mosques within a half mile of our hotel. To western ears, a single Adhan is kind of haunting and beautiful. Several of them at once, accompanied by dogs barking, roosters crowing, and donkeys braying… well, it’s cacophony. Interesting and beautiful, in its own way, but the early hour and competing sounds made for more of a “really?!” feeling than anything else.
After some fitful post-auditory-mahem sleep, we got up for real around 7:30am. Our plan for the day was to tackle the 30km, or 18 mile, circuit hike from Chefchaouen (pronounced “shef-showen”, Arabic for “sore quads”), to a couple of neighboring villages, returning to Chefchaouen in the evening. We expected the hike to take 12 hours, more or less depending on how much time we spent in those other villages. Anna had wisely bought some potentially faux- Puma shoes the day before; I had not done the same and so was faced with a choice of Reef flops or loafers. I went with the flops, and we got on the trail around 8:30am, heading roughly southeast, towards Bab Taza, the first stop.
Now, the interesting thing about walking on these trails is that they have been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. There’s something kind of sobering about seeing a goatherd and his flock, and realizing that some other guy, with some other goats, was doing that exact same thing well before the Internet was invented. It’s also more than a little amazing that those ancient people actually found anything, since we were continually blundering down plausible but false paths, up the walkways to peoples’ houses, and generally having a hard time finding our way.
At one point, after about two hours of hiking, just as we decided to scale some scree because that simply had to be the path, some kind women from a nearby house manage to communicate with hand gestures and smiles that we were completely bats, and that Bab Taza was in fact to be found by following the big dirt road running through their village.
The hike itself was beautiful; great scenic views of Moroccan countryside, fantastic small houses and hamlets, and plenty of farmland and farm animals. However, after three or four hours of hiking, and not having found Bab Taza yet, our nerves were a bit frayed and our feet were sore (Anna having broken in her putative Pumas by walking maybe two hours the day before, and me in flops). We had finally come around a bend in the road we were sort of following and into view of what might have been Bab Taza when we sort of got to that decision point: keep going indefinitely, go down to what might or might not be Bab Taza to eat and grab a taxi back to Chefchaouen, or give up and head back more or less the way we’d come.
We opted for the latter, perhaps not the most xenophilic choice, but this was clearly a demonstration of the principle that bad footwear is the archnemesis of adventure. I’m sure that’s proverb somewhere. So we trekked back towards Chefchaouen. There’s not a lot to report about the trip back except the large billy goat that Anna had some mutual startledom with (he was climbed up in a bush she walked by) and the kind local women – yes, the very same kind local women – who rolled their eyes at us as we descended through their farmland trying to get back to the road that would take us to Chefchaouen. Those women will get a lot of mileage out of the “the day some strange westerners wandered all over our land, seemingly incapable of finding anything” story.
Upon our footsore but decidedly not fancy return to Hotel Loubar, we got truly prodigious amounts of dirt and muck off of our feet, and generally complained about the soreness, muck, and so on, before wandering back into town to find some food. By this time it was around 3:30pm, so most restaurants were in the lunch/dinner lull, but a couple of the places by the Kasbah were pretty touristy and probably open all the time, and we got some moderately tasty stuff (a too-not-crispy chicken tajine for me, spaghetti Bolognese for Anna, the meat of which was just kofta cooked on skewers and dumped into the tomato sauce). We also fed and pet some cute kitties. Chefchaouen is *full* of kitties.
After lunch, we wandered through the Kasbah, which was also something of a cultural museum. It’s a beautiful building with a large courtyard with great plants, a pretty tall tower from which you can see a lot of the city, and a fairly grim/kinky (depending on your point of view) prison section down under the tower. It’s not worth the trip to Chefchaouen just to see the Kasbah, but if you cruise down to check out the very cool, and very blue, town just to enjoy the place, the Kasbah is well worth stopping by.
The day, and our stay in Chefchaouen, finally wrapping up, we eventually headed back to Hotel Loubar, setting the alarm for 6:45am but knowing that the multi-Adhan mayhem would wake us earlier. Day Twenty-Nine, which day merits a paragraph at most, consisted of driving back to Tangier and flying to Istanbul by way of Madrid. We were in the Tangier airport by 10:30am, and arrived in Istanbul after uneventful flights around 11:45pm. The highlight of the day, for me at least, was the super tasty 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon that they were pouring in Iberia’s lounge during our three hour connection in Madrid.
So passed our time in Morocco, and a good time it was. In addition to being a new country to both Anna and I, it was kind of a natural progression on our trip, since it was decidedly more western than Egypt had been, and we knew that the upcoming countries of Turkey, Hungary, Croatia, and even the U.K. would become even more so.