Chefchaouen's old medina is painted top to bottom in blue and white and rests on the slopes of the Rif mountains. If you hike thru them you'll find monkeys in the summit forest and a funny thin leaved plant tucked between the rows of tomatoes and peppers and as a result, the entire city is completely stoned.
Closer to Spain, the language pool increases by one and Darlene has intermixed her french and spanish with remarkable ease, "combien ça coûte for una habitación?" But one ubiquitous word rises above them all, "hashish?" No, non, la, emphatically no.
Not since Cuba have I experienced such vacant service. On the small caribean island, they were just bored and on the dole, paid regardless. In the Rifs, they're just, plain, stoned. Every menu, salad and tea is a long time in the coming. You can't change restaurants, it's everywhere. We even had to tally our own bill, they just couldn't remember what we ordered or the prices.
And in the evening, passing by the doors of all the pensions and hostals, are the giggles of tourists. But for all those Moms out there, worry not, we've seen Midnight Express and prefer to enjoy the long, slow meals for what they are.
It was a local bus, it stopped everywhere. We approached the Sahara and the military presence increased in every town, inching our way toward Algeria. Finally, a taxi dropped us off in the middle of the desert, a ghost town. We were fifty kilometers from the border.
In a small garden courtyard, over a pot of tea, I negotiated hard, a camel for my girl, a night in the desert. A deal was struck and my guide and I walked alongside Darlene, regal on her camel. From high in the dunes, we could gaze over the black Sahara and into Algeria.
That night, after a fiery sunset, the moon rose over our camp, a valley in the dunes, a lone date palm, and a grumpy caravan of camels. Two cots pushed together, we slept in the open air, under a pile of wool blankets.
For this particular climb you go under the phone cables on the way up, but you lower down over the cables for clean rope management. Meanwhile the busses and tourists line up behind you for some blatant showmanship.
Gratuitous as that is, most of the Todra Gorge's crags are further upstream and much more peaceful, some climbing right out of the river-side gardens as local women harvest their crops. The goats will beat you up any climb, but they prefer a much more precarious route over the scree fields that seem foolish to me.
Kester forgot to mention two important things. One, Taghazoute is drier than Zion. And two, the surf doesn't really kick in until November.
