Day 9 - Chefchaouen

You all know Anna by now and her obsession with bodies of water, so a swimming pool must be utilised as much as possible. This meant we had an early swim before check out. We also managed to book our accommodation and transport for the next 3 days, bagging 2 of the last 4 seats to Chefchauen just in time. Phew!

Our 20 minute walk to the bus station felt like an hour in this heat but I had found a lovely restaurant to have lunch at before our bus. Le Bourgeois helped us cool down and be watered and fed before our 4hr30min bus…it better be worth all this travel. Experts as we are now, I was even asked by another tourist if this was the right bus for him, although I definitely looked less of a local now as Anna had made me shave my beard.

An endless bus journey took us through the green forest-covered mountains of northern Morocco, arriving in the blue city of Chefchaouen. With hints of Santorini and the Amalfi Coast, two Irish boys on our bus were disappointed and thought the whole place would be blue.

Oddly enough, there was a severe lack of taxi’s fighting for our fare to our hotel. In fact, there wasn’t a taxi in sight and we had to climb up a small hill before we finally found one. We are staying in Riad La Santa for 2 nights and as we arrived quite late, we were immediately out on the hunt for dinner.

Our host recommended Galito’s, actually quite a nice little restaurant that got all our orders wrong. Nevertheless, we ate what they gave us, plus dessert, all for only £14. The prices are really something else over here. Apparently there is only one place that sells alcohol in Chefchaouen so we both sipped on our new obsession - Hawaii. A blend of coconut, passionfruit and fizzy orange.

We took a dander around the hilly streets of Chefchaouen and found ourselves almost right away in the main square. The whole town was much smaller than I thought it was going to be, although it was still packed with people and the usual annoying men chatting to you.

Before we knew it, we were back at our Riad and were invited to the terrace to have some Moroccan tea and watch the stars. Despite being a stone’s throw away from the noisy streets, it was quite relaxing up on the roof. Before retiring to bed, we managed to get a few facts out of our host about the place.

It began as a small fortress to fight the Portuguese invasions of Morocco before several tribes, and especially the jews came to it fleeing, Spain. Despite other reasons about scaring mosquitos away or blue symbolising water, the jews painted their walls (the jewish quarter) due to their belief and eventually, this spread over the whole town to attract tourists…well I suppose it worked.