15th June - Chefchaouen

Our guided tour was rubbish.  The guide turned up late, in a Fiat Punto driven by a mate, not exactly the "tourist car high up so you can see things" that we'd been expecting.  He then drove us through the three towns which make up Fez, past the royal palace without stopping, past the public parks without stopping.  We arrived at a viewpoint where we were allowed to get out and take some photos.  On the bright side, the guide did at least tell us something about what we were looking at.

 

Then we drove straight to the Medina (walled city) and walked at a brisk pace through the various souqs.  If we stopped to look at things, the guide carried on ahead until he missed us, then stood around talking on his mobile phone.  We went to the Wood Museum, which was quite pricey to get in and contained, well, stuff made of wood, mostly from the 20^th Century.  Then we rushed on through the market to a "traditional house" which was in fact a carpet showroom, but it did house the day's first interesting sight.

 

On the top floor, a family of women were weaving a carpet, in the traditional way, hand-tying all the knots.  I've seen carpets being made before, but these people were actually doing it as a way of life, not just in a cack-handed fashion to show tourists.  They beckoned us to sit down and showed us how to tie the knots, although I was pretty rubbish at it, particularly compared to the young girl sitting next to me who did it so quick you couldn't see her hands move.  She had a huge callous across her left hand from the weaving.  Nicki had a go too, and I took some photos, and we left them with a fairly generous tip as I'd run out of small change.

 

Then the hard sell began;  the guy in charge offered me a tea, rushed through the history of the house, and started to unfurl carpets.  I told him straight away that we appreciated his efforts, but we weren't going to buy a carpet.  He then went on about how reasonable they were and how we could buy two, sell one in the UK and pay for the other one with the proceeds;  of course, we still didn't want to buy a flaming carpet.  He wasn't exactly aggressive, but he was certainly forceful, and liked to talk loudly bordering on shouting.  It gets annoying when people won't take no for an answer though.  My tea arrived at length so I drank up and we left.  It was about this time that our guide, who was obviously on commission, just about gave up altogether.

 

On we rushed through the souqs, stopping to eye up bananas (too expensive), joss sticks (too expensive), dried apricots (too expensive but I bought a quid's worth anyway), and nougat, which was the only thing we looked at where the guy was charging a reasonable price and didn't try to rip us off.  Exiting stage left, we waited for our official Tourist Punto to turn up, and off we hurried to visit the Pottery Workshop.  (The guide wanted to take us to the tannery, but one tannery is enough;  again, he was not happy about this, because he was focused on the commission he'd have got if we'd bought anything there.)

 

I found the pottery workshop the second interesting thing of the day.  We were shown round the whole process, from making the clay, fashioning it into tiles, glazing it, firing it, through to the intricate process of marking the tiles and cutting them individually with a hammer into shapes to make mosaics.  Elsewhere, we saw a guy expertly making a tagine on a potter's wheel, and we saw plates being hand-painted, the work being quite impressive.  Here we didn't get such a hard sell;  we were invited to look around the shop, and they did have a couple of nice bits and pieces, but it was actually quite pricey, so I didn't buy anything, but I tipped the guy who'd shown us around.

 

Our wonderful guide then announced that the tour was over.  Apparently we'd seen all there was to see of Fez and that was the best he could do.  When he'd turned up late in the morning, he'd said we could have an extra hour to make up for it, but that all went out the window, and when we protested he accused us of trying to find a reason to complain!  We insisted on going back to see the outside of the Royal Palace again, so when we stopped there, we walked around the area in no hurry whatsoever, saw the palace, and bought some bread.  When we returned to the taxi, the guide had left altogether (apparently his son was ill so he went home), and the driver took us back to the campsite.

 

Nicki wanted to pay less than we'd agreed, as we'd been given a whole lot less than we'd been led to believe, but in the end I thought it would be so much trouble to argue with the guy that we might as well just pay and leave.  In hindsight we should have got him to spell out exactly what we were getting, written it down, and put times to it, but the tour we got in Marrakech was good, so we didn't expect to come such a cropper here.  Interestingly, the other English couple also went on a tour, and they paid more than we did, but they were quite happy with theirs.

 

We had considered going on from Fez to Rabat, the capital, but quite honestly by this time we were getting pretty fed up of the Moroccans, whose sole aim in life is to rip off tourists.  Sod em!  In some ways things haven't changed so much since Mungo Park found the Moors so objectionable 200 years ago.  (In defence of Morocco, I should say that until we got as far north as Agadir, and the tourist trail, we found the Moroccans effusively friendly and charming;  Fez has been a particular nadir of the whole Moroccan experience.)   So instead we decided to head towards Ceuta and the ferry back to Spain.  As we left the campsite, they tried to charge us for an extra night, as we'd stayed past mid-day, but I think the murderous look in Nicki's eyes convinced them otherwise.

 

Our goal for the day was to reach Chefchouan, which entailed another mountain drive.  We navigated across Fez with surprising success, and started ascending through the spectacular Rift Valley mountains.  Here we found many people at the side of the road waved, or even clapped and cheered, and at one point about one oncoming car in three was flashing its lights and waving at us.  As the journey progressed, however, we reached an area known more accurately as the Hash Valley.  This is the centre of Morocco's successful marijuana industry, which accounts for about 85% of UK usage and is worth a staggering $2bn to the country.  Although illegal to farm, the authorities overlook the industry to a ridiculous extent, as great areas of the valley are carpeted with fields of marijuana plants, and you can see the happy farmers harvesting their crops with gay abandon.  The stuff's all down the side of the road.

 

At this point the friendly waves changed into strange gestures which meant "Buy some hash off me!"  To start with it was quite funny, and Nicki even mimed back the Macarena dance to one guy who was making all sorts of odd gesticulations.  However, pretty soon, literally every single man we passed, young, old or juvenile, whether standing by the side of the road or in another moving vehicle, was whistling, waving or shouting at us to try to sell us dope.  The guide book explains that the locals just won't believe that any European passing through isn't trying to buy hash, and that hit the nail on the head.  It got rather tiresome as the hours went by.  I pulled over at one point to stretch my legs, and every single car passing us pulled over to try to sell us drugs.  You can't get a moment's peace here.  In the town of Ketama, it reached epidemic proportions;  a couple of times people actually drove after us and tried to pull us over to sell us dope!

 

Ketama demonstrated to us another Moroccan national past-time, that of people wandering aimlessly down the middle of the road and getting in the way of the traffic.  It's not that there aren't perfectly good footpaths, it's just that pedestrians seem to be oblivious to the fact that there might be vehicular traffic using one of the main cross-country freight routes.  Our air horn generally gets people out the way, although it feels very un-English to be using it.  Ideally it would be nice if the idiots didn't meander down the middle of the road in the first place, particularly when you're following something else and they all fill in behind it.

 

I was getting a bit irritated by this time, and was considering actually trying to run people over, when some guys in an ancient Renault pulled alongside us, greeted us in English, then pulled in front of us and started gesticulating and shouting.  The gist of what they were trying to get across was that they wanted us to pull off at their farm and they'd most generously give us hash, show us photos, etc.  This is the last thing we wanted to do, and would probably have ended up with us being robbed, if not set up with the police, who work in cahoots with the dealers.  The guy drove right in front of us for several miles, going through all manner of song and dance, and of course we didn't have the speed to overtake.  I started to wonder whether it might come to us having to diplomatically ram him if he tried to force us to follow him off the road, or block our route.  Luckily, this didn't happen, and eventually he pulled over, hoping we would too, and we drove on past him.  It sounds dramatic, but it was quite threatening at the time.

 

The mountains don't stop, but the scenery gets even more impressive on the way north.  It was beginning to get dark, and driving on these windy mountain roads with Land Rover headlights at night wasn't a very appealing prospect;  however, the English couple from Fez had tried rough-camping in this area and had been forced to drive on in the middle of the night, having been surrounded by rowdy, stone-throwing youths who were climbing on their van, so we didn't want to stop.  On the bright side, we did get a spectacular mountain sunset, although when I stopped to photograph it, people materialised from nowhere and tried to sell us hash.

 

We made Chefchouan at about 9.30pm.  The campsite is signposted right across the town, which is lucky as you'd never find it otherwise.  The first vehicle I saw as we pulled up was an English-plated Land Rover, so I stopped for a chat.  The couple have driven all the way from Namibia, and are now heading home.  But, by an amazing coincidence, ours isn't the first 6x6 101 they've seen today!  Apparently an English guy in Spain has just finished converting one, and they met him this morning.  Rather astonishing that there are only two of these trucks in existence, and they should see both on the same day, in North Africa.  I was disappointed not to have seen the other one as well, as it would have been great to have compared notes.

 

As Nicki checked us in at the campsite, a hullabaloo erupted outside.  Apparently a rabid mountain dog had just walked into the campsite and was causing a few problems.  This happens frequently, so they knew what to do:  a small child went to capture it on a lead, whereupon the kafuffle increased as the dog started howling and all the other dogs on the campsite went off as well, so eventually the check-in man apologised to Nicki and went out to help.  They loaded it into a van and drove it off somewhere.  The van came back later empty.