Word Of Mouse

The bus journey from Fes was very easy. We turned up at the bus station at ten to eight and with the help of a friendly bus company representative, were soon on board the 8 am service to Chefchaoun. This served to make us more trusting of bus company reps in future, a trust which sadly turned out to lead us into trouble - but more of that later.

Chefchaoun is listed in the guidebook as a hangout for bleary hippies, being sited squarely in the major marijuana-growing district of the world's most productive cannabis-cultivating country. It is a smallish town, sited in a wide flat valley backed by the Rif Mountains. We fell in love with its easy going air: it was a novelty to walk through the medina with our backpacks on and get not the slightest bit of hassle. After a welcome lunch at a rastafarian themed bar, complete with the usual Bob Marley songs playing on the stereo, we booked in at a nearby pension. The town is visually very striking: many of the houses, within the medina and outside, are painted up to the height of ten feet or so from the ground in varying shades of blue, from the palest blue-white to patches of the darkest midnight blue, and all shades between.

The second day in Chefchaoun was the first day of Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. It brought glorious sunshine and dramatic cloudscapes. After breakfast at the cafe, during which we spent a happy hour watching the citizenry of Chefchaoun parading past in their new clothes, we decided to stretch our legs with a walk up into the mountains.

The path lay up a winding track through cedar and pine forests, through a large herd of inquisitive and rather smelly goats, and had our lunch in the shade of a large rock surrounded by spectacular views. As we ate, we saw a European woman coming down the track the other way, in lightweight clothing and struggling with dress shoes quite unsuited to the stony terrain. We made snide comments to each other about someone who evidently had not the first idea about what is needed for a hike in the mountains, but as we fell into chatting with her on the way back down, we had to eat our words. She was a Polish woman who had moved to Morocco to work for a film services company, part of Morocco's booming film industry, who spoke at least four languages, and who for the last ten months had been living on her own in the middle of Tangier medina. She liked Morocco very much and had had no problems. We were impressed, but privately agreed that much as we admired Morocco and its people, no way would we be able to live there.

The next day bought looming skies, which soon turned to rain and cold wind. We messed around taking photos of the medina, read our books, ate an indifferent lunch, checked our email, read some more. Suppertime, we decided to go back to the same restaurant where we had eaten the first night, which had been good. This time however we were shown to a table in the front room beside the open windows, which now instead of admitting cooling night breezes and gently scented zephyrs, were now like bare holes in the wall through which poured howling blasts of icy and rain-soaked air. We had to eat quickly, shivering in our waterproof coats, and vowed to leave Chefchaoun the next day.