Day 8 of Moroccan Vacation: Chefchaouen on February 12th, 2017

Eighth day in Morocco as we woke up to a rainy morning in Meknes.
The plan of the day was to reach the town of Chefchaouen in Northern Morocco. Nicknamed “blue city”, its building painted in matching blue has attracted visitors over the century.

The images in this post are hosted on Imgur. Email me should there be any display problems.

There weren’t many buses between Meknes and Chefchaouen, usually tourists link Chefchaouen with the more famous royal city of Fes in their itinerary where buses were more frequent. There was a CTM daily service between Rabat and Chefchaouen, one of few bus serives in Morocco with a timetable published online, but it didn’t fit into our plan really well.
So after some research online(wikitravel.org/en/Meknes), we decided to take the 5-am bus to Chefchaouen, and that we sort of had to get up this morning miserably early.
Well, it was a cold rainy morning, and water seemed to be pouring down from every household inside the Medina (I was hit by some, so I was sure they weren’t simply rain water), and it was by no means pleasant.

Luckily, our riad wasn’t far from Gare Routière (bus station) that’s West of Medina. But after nearly lost our way in Meknes Medina (OpenStreetMap wasn’t nearly as detailed in Meknes Medina as in other medina’s) and walking in bitter morning rain for 15 minutes, we were hit with a disasterous news from the ticket counter that the 5-am bus to Chefchaouen didn’t exist. They told us there was a 7-am (indirect) bus, which was very much our only option.

So we joined the local nannies at the bus station and killed those two hours with episodes of Legal High.

As for the bus, well, it was by no means modern but at least it’s clean and tidy and it’s got cushion seats.
And unlike Moroccan trains, it departed on time.

When buying this ticket I particularly asked whether this was a direct bus and I got the answer yes. But the fact was that, my friend and I (together with two Moroccan people) were dropped of in the city of Ouezzane where we waited on the side of the road for 25 minutes to change onto another bus. I guessed either whoever I brought ticket from didn’t speak proper English, or that “direct” actually accounted for a bus conductor that was with us in Ouezzane waiting (well, he got the money).

So we left Meknes at 7am and arrived at Chefchaouen at 1140, which was 203 kilometers away. From there it was another 2km (and 80 meters up in elevation) to our hotel in Chefchaouen Medina, which took us 20 dirhams.

After that, we settled our bags in our hotel room. We just wanted to experience this blue city and didn’t have any planned route in mind, so after that we began our “random walk” in the town of Chefchaouen.

There are several theories as to why the walls were painted blue. One popular theory is that the blue keeps mosquitos away, another is that Jews introduced the blue when they took refuge from Hitler in the 1930s. The blue is said to symbolize the sky and heaven, and serve as a reminder to lead a spiritual life. (Reference: “Chefchaouen: Walking the blue streets of Morocco”. Middle East Eye. Retrieved 2016-04-10.)
Also, the town was famous for its (presumably illegal) recreational weed, which I despised.

Soon we wandered into the main town plaza, with Chefchaouen Kasbah (that my friend wasn’t interested in), and Chefchaouen Mosque (that wasn’t open to non-Muslims). It was past 1pm, and it seemed that the only restaurants in Chefchaouen Medina was in that plaza, so we had our lunch first.

It seemed that the local Moroccan people did take their time in preparing meals, we waited for 20 minutes for our dishes to be served. Meanwhile, our only entertainment was watching cats running around us.

It was my friend who first spotted this unusually pink cat. Guess that was some rare genetic mutation.

After lunch, our random walk continued. The lower (southern) and more populated part of Chefchaouen Medina were mostly shops selling clothes and tourist souvenirs.

As we wandered up the hill and into the Northern part of Chefchaouen, it was more and more residential, less commercial.

It was 1448 when I took this photo, and the “clock” on the wall read 1455. It would be really amazing if that “clock” on the wall was an actual clock that went with the time (Well, I didn’t have the patience to wait there and see.).

After that, we went back to our hotel and took some rest to recover from today’s early rise. We went out again at 4pm to take another random walk in the town of Chefchaouen, before heading to Spanish Mosque on a nearby hill, which was a great viewing point of the blue town of Chefchaouen and sunset.

Just around El Haouta Plaza my friend and I bumped into the greatest desert shop we ever seen in Morocco. Well, I had zero resistance to the temptation of cream and sweets, and I was in such a fairytale town all painted in peaceful blue, why not sweeten this day dream a little bit more?
So the cakes and sweets I bought ended up becoming my dinner that day.

This time, we reached even further uphill into the North border of the town, where tourists shops along the street were replaced with local households. There were local boys and girls in the hands of their grandparents coming home from a walk, there were teenage boys turning Chefchaouen streets into soccer fields, typical relaxing town life.

Although we knew the Northern part of Chefchaouen town would be more residential, we didn’t expect to smell of cows and sheep and saw people raising them on the ground floors of their buildings.

After that it was 1720, about half an hour till sunset time, and we decided to climb up nearby hill to reach Spanish Mosque, a great viewing point for the town of Chefchaouen and sunset.
Only that the clouds were thick that afternoon (and it began to drizzle later on), so, no luck for sunset.

As for the Spanish Mosque, the town of Chefchaouen had long been under Spanish reign until last century when Spain returned the town to Morocco after its independence, that’s presumably when this church was turned into a mosque.

We stayed up the hilll till 1830, when the freezing rain became too cold for us to bear. The trail downhill wasn’t very well illuminated after dark, and it was a rainy night that made everything slippery.

After that, we arrived at our hotel and called it a day.

END

Day 8 of Moroccan Vacation: Chefchaouen on February 12th, 2017 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.