Our brother/sister trip around Africa ground to a halt at its second stop, in Chefchaouen, Morocco.
Chefchaouen is a sleepy little pueblo in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco. The entire medina is painted different shades of blue, creating a surreal effect when wandering the streets. Tourism has exploded here in recent years; “even five years ago, Chefchaouen was nothing,” my local friends said.
Chefchaouen is famous for three things, they’d continue:
- The water, which comes straight down from the nearby mountains, and is some of the purest drinking water in all of Morocco;
- The hashish, which is grown in the nearby mountains and offered to you everywhere;
- And ‘the relax.’
Sounds pretty good, right?
Yeah, sounded pretty good to me, too.
“I have to come here at least once a year,” said Waheeb, a Moroccan climber I meet in Chaouen. Waheeb’s a character: he claims to have crossed Africa on foot, from Somalia to Senegal. And I have no reason to doubt his claim.
“Even if I am somewhere else in the world, I will return to Morocco — just to visit Chaouen. My soul just doesn’t feel right if I don’t visit this place enough,” he told me one night, sitting out in the crisp mountain air, staring at the stars.
I could see where he was coming from.
thisisyouth 