Archives for March 2015

I wandered around Chefchaouen alone while Spencer napped back at the hotel. I climbed to one of the highest points in the medina, an area not on the must-see-for-tourists list. Though the walls were still washed with Chefchaouen blue, the alleyways looked a little down at the heels.

I was here.

What you see in the left side of the photo is not a body of water, but is rather the top of the clouds that blanket the valley below. As I gazed out at this strange scene, a Berber man came out of one of the houses and struck up a conversation. It was the usual where-are-you-from, is-this-your-first-time-here talk. He introduced himself to me as Michael. Right.

Our talk turned quickly to hashish. This was not unusual. As we walked around Chefchaouen, Spencer and I were often approached by young men offering us the Rif Mountains’ most famous product. I frequently smelled the sweet odor of burning hash as I walked around. Sometimes I wondered if half the town was baked.

Anyway, I politely declined Michael’s offer, but he persisted. A woman came out of the same house and came over to us. Michael introduced her as his wife and invited me in to share tea with them. Again I demurred.

Undeterred, Michael laid his cards on the table. He had (or had access to) twenty kilos of hashish, which he wanted me to smuggle to some guy in California. I would be well paid for my services.

While Michael was laying out his business proposal, his wife was eyeing me hungrily with barely-disguised sexual interest.

There are so many ways this could go horribly wrong, I thought. Was Michael or his wife wearing a wire? Would Michael take murderous offense to the way his wife was sizing me up? Or was her nonverbal offer just part of the recruitment effort? Were there other confederates nearby waiting to ply me with less pleasurable persuasion?

Choosing my words carefully, I said that I had to meet someone just then, but suggested that Michael and I exchange phone numbers and contact each other the following day. Of course, I didn’t mention that I planned to be long gone by then. To my relief, Michael was amenable to my suggestion. We traded numbers. Then he fished into his pocket and gave me a small rock of hashish — a free sample, he said. I thanked him, pocketed it, shook his hand, and headed back to the Casa Miguel Guesthouse where we were staying.

Once I was in our room, I took the rock out of my pocket and considered my options. Though hash use is pretty widespread in Chefchaouen, it is against Moroccan law and carries significant penalties. No way was that worth the risk. A little sadly, I flushed the rock.

By the time Michael called me the next day, I was in a car halfway to Casablanca. I deleted his number and his call and trashed my Moroccan SIM card at the airport.

Maybe I was being excessively cautious. But no way was I going to even consider for a moment a career as a drug mule. The very extravagance of the proposition made me a little amused — and a little anxious.

There weren’t many signs in Chefchaouen. Those that do exist are as artfully designed as the rest of the town.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH the terms of my contract with the service that hosts this blog, and IN COMPLIANCE WITH longstanding Internet law which requires me to make at least one (1) blog post annually showing pictures of cats, NOW BE IT KNOWN that I herewith submit twenty one (21) photos of the felines of Chefchaouen, Morocco.

Having discharged my legal and contractual responsibilities above, I invite your comments.

Chefchaouen is a town of 35,000 souls located in the Rif Mountains of northwest Morocco. From the moment we stepped off our bus from Fes until the wee hours of the morning four days later when we boarded a grand taxi for Casablanca, I felt like I was living in a psychedelic haze.

Almost every rough rock wall in the medina has been scrubbed with a blue wash that produces differing shades and gradations. As the sun completed its daily arc through the sky, the blues cycled through many different hues, from Prussian blue to navy to cobalt blue to indigo to turquoise. At times the walls looked like snowdrifts on one of those winter days where the snow catches and color of the sky. I often passed by an alleyway and didn’t recognize it a few hours later because the hues had changed so much. The shifting tones of blue put me in mind of a dream. Chefchaouen is a place where everything seems not quite real.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel extensively in the last two years. And I can say that Chefchaouen is the single most visually arresting place I have visited, with the possible exception of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom.

We were here:

Unlike the sprawling labyrinthine medinas of Fes and Marrakech — and, for that matter, Sousse — Chefchaouen was easy to navigate.

But I did get lost in a nonliteral way as I watched the textures of the blue-washed stucco and rocks. They shimmered. They breathed.

I felt a literal chill as I turned corners and took in new vistas. It’s hard to believe that a place like this actually exists.

I feel compelled to add a technical photographic note here. I have only minimally edited these pictures. In most cases, all I did was to convert them from RAW format to JPEGs. In a few instances, I upped the exposure levels, since the mix of shadows and bright sunlight in the medina sometimes resulted in the underexposure of some parts of some photos. But in the main, you are seeing the colors I saw. This is real. And seems unreal.

As I look over my photos of Fes, I am struck by what a forbidding place it must seem. Closed doors. Windowless walls. Toothed rooflines. Narrow alleys. A sullen yellow color scheme. On the surface, Marrakech seemed more welcoming, but Marrakech’s welcome is that of a smiling salesman who’s hoping to part you from your cash. Fes feels more genuine.

We spent most of our time in the medina, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With its thousands mostly unnamed streets and alleyways, it is an easy place to get lost in. But maybe “lost” is the wrong word. When you don’t have a specific destination and are there to see what is to be seen, you can’t ever be truly lost. We did, however, misplace our accommodations (the Dar Sondos Guesthouse) more than once.

And so we wandered through the melancholy and secrets of the medieval streets.

I like leather — belts, shoes, straps, accents. One of my favorite possessions, in fact, is a heavy leather overnight bag made by Saddleback Leather and gifted to me by a very good friend. It weighs a ton. It takes a good three minutes to open or close. It’s wildly impractical compared to all the lightweight many-pocketed overnight bags other people have. But I love it for its style and durability.

As much as I appreciate good leather, I had never given much thought to how it’s made. At a tannery in Fes, I got an education.

When the animal skins come in, they are first soaked in vats of pigeon shit. The ammonia released by the guano softens the leather.

Next the pieces are placed in dyeing vats to produce the desired color.

The pieces are stomped on by workers inside the vats to work the dye into the leather. Finally, the skins are removed and left out to dry.

It’s smelly, dirty work. We were given sprigs of mint to hold under our noses as we walked through. The workers, though, had no such comfort, let alone health and safety gear. The process and the facility seem to be centuries old. I still love my leather, but I now have a new appreciation of the work that goes into it.

While Marrakech is unabashedly touristy, Fes is more reserved. Its medina is said to have 9,700-some streets and alleys. Some of these are so narrow that one has to angle one’s shoulders slightly sideways to pass. The signs and graffiti on the medina walls are down-home and aimed at locals, not tourists.

The road ended in Zagora. Spencer and I met up with a Berber guide and two camels, who were to be our rides into the desert.

On a signal from our guide, the camels lay down, folding their legs flat under them. We climbed on our camels, sitting slightly behind the hump on top of some saddle blankets. A metal handhold was affixed to a strap that ran around the animal’s underside. We held on, and at a signal from our guide, the camels stood up. Quickly. Our guide lashed our gear to the straps that secured the saddle blankets, and we were off.

The foothills of the Atlas range soon gave way to relatively flat desert sand. It was already late afternoon when we started off, and soon we were treated to the rise of the full moon from behind the hills. It bathed the desert in light bright enough to cast shadows.

Eventually, we came to a Berber encampment that consisted of about a half-dozen tents made from sewn-together pieces of burlap. Some other travelers joined us there. This was our home for the night.

While the outside wasn’t much to look at, the insides were positively luxurious. Our beds were enormous and were covered with heavy blankets that kept us warm even in the cold desert night. A solar panel provided electricity for a small lightbulb, but that ran out after about three hours.

We had a nice dinner of chicken tagine, followed by an impromptu concert by the Berber guides. I had hoped to see a brilliant spangle of stars in the desert sky, but the moon washed out everything except the very brightest of them.

We got up early the next morning so we could ride in the cooler part of the day. Our transportation awaited us.

We mounted up again and headed back to Zagora. It was a short trek. Too short. Now that I’ve seen what it’s like, I will go longer and deeper into the desert next time.

Traveling by camel is obviously a tourist fantasy. Berbers today are far more likely to take 4x4s into the desert. Despite the contrivance, though, seeing the desert from camelback was a lot more intimate than glimpsing it through a car window. And it was not too difficult to imagine what life must have been like for desert nomads before roads and 4x4s pushed into the Sahara.

From Marrakech, we headed southeast toward the Algerian border. The road took us through the Atlas Mountains, through the town of Ouarzazate, and ended in Zagora, on the edge of the Sahara Desert

The Atlas Mountains were spectacular and much bigger than I had expected. The road turned into a series of switchbacks and the air thinned out.

Along the way, we passed by movie studios where we glimpsed giant sets that could be configured to look like ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, and the modern Middle East.

Bouncing around in the backseat of a 4×4 as we passed over the Atlas range made me a little queasy. I popped some dimenhydrinate, which had the unfortunate side effect of making me sleepy and a little disoriented. We stopped for lunch along the way, but regrettably I didn’t note exactly where we were.

Finally, we descended through a long series of hairpin turns and came to Zagora.

We were here: