chefchaouen

All of us soaking wet after being rained on all day.




The big waterfall we hiked to!





Tom leaping through the air. To the side you see Dodge, Henry, and Lyall


In the minibus on the way to the bottom of the 'trail' we hiked


Pretty!

The small waterfall halfway through the full hike (some people only hike to this point)

Chloe by the pond at the base of the bigger waterfall where we swam!

9/27/09

So this weekend we went to Chefchaouen! I'll divide the entries up by days. All in all, this trip was a great test run for weekend traveling. Basically Chloe and I learned some valuable things about traveling in Morocco such as, don't trust boys to make travel arrangements for you, always pray before entering taxis, and always start trying to get home first thing in the morning - that way you might actually find a bus or train that will get you home by the night. The transportation systems here are extremely unreliable and we found we were better off bargaining with taxi/minibus drivers for rides places.

Ok, so Chefchaouen is known as "the blue city" because many of the houses and medina walls are painted blue, an influence from the large Jewish population which used to inhabit the town. Now it is part of "Spanish Morocco" and we had a rough time communicating with anyone because they speak a funky mix of Spanish and Arabic whereas down in Rabat people speak Dareeja (i don't know how to spell it, but its the Moroccan dialect of Arabic) and French. My French is pretty awful and I have a hard enough time trying to communicate in French here in Rabat, but even the people fluent in French couldn't speak to folks. Plenty of people spoke English and could help us though.

I have come to realize that money talks - and it speaks English.

The first day we decided to hike to a waterfall we read about in Lonely Planet, so we set out via minibus on the 40 minute car ride to the bottom of this hike. After starting out then realizing we really didn't know where in the world we were going, we took a guy up on a led hike to the waterfall. Of course, it began to rain. It wasn't torrential, just a sprinkle, but we were in it for so long that we all ended up soaking wet.

Oh yeah, and I swam at the waterfall. It was the coldest water I have EVER swum in, but I loved every moment of it. I think it might be the coolest thing I've ever done. The hike back down the mountain was a lot faster than the hike up because we were all soaking wet and MORE than ready to get into dry clothes - although we did see monkeys scaling the side of the mountain on the trip down. Total the hike there and back was 6 hours.

That night after getting back to the hotel and dry again we all went out to dinner. I had some really great pastilla, which I've never had before. Yum!

I won't get all fruity on you, but suffice it to say that I was feeling really free and one with nature and all that getting rained on in Africa.