Chefchauen: the Blue and White Town
3 pm: I catch a local company bus from Tangier to Chefchaouen. We soon enter the Rif: a mountainous but green area, with animals pasturing. From time to time the bus encounters some farmers with traditional cloths, walking along the streets with their mules.
Once in Chefchauen, I ask directions for my hotel (El Andaluz) to a young girl who can speak English incredibly well. She says she has learned it watching movies and in three years of high school! I wish her a very bright future. To get to the hotel I must enter the medina through one of its doors. I find myself going up a steep street, very narrow, with small shops on both sides. All the houses are white and light blue (with many shades of blue). It looks a little bit like San Marino, but with different colours and different smells.
It’s really as beautiful as people describe it.
I leave my baggage at the hotel, and I have dinner in restaurant suggested by the Routard (As Saada). Soup (harira), Tajine and dessert for 40 Dh! Then I have a night walk along small streets and cozy little shops.
Time to go to sleep: back to the hotel! – Which, by the way, is very beautiful, full of colourful majolicas and with two white and blue small terraces on the roof…
My second day in Chefchaouen is dedicated to relax. I wake up quite early and go to have breakfast at Aziz’s: pain au chocolat, cafè noir and jus d’orange. It looks like an American fast food, but it serves delicious freshly made pastries.
I then stroll around the medina, looking for Ras el Ma (the town spring). I ask directions to a nice lady, who doesn’t seem to know where the spring is, but invites me to her house in Rabat, and gives me her telephone number. People are so kind!
Afterwards, I find two kids who offer to guide me to my destination. I give them some Dh each, but they don’t seem happy… I guess they were expecting more…
On my way to Ras el Ma I buy a pair of very fake but cute Tuareg earrings, probably made in China… At the spring there are some Moroccan tourists, and also some local girls doing their laundry, who don’t really appreciate my attempt of taking photos of them…
Back to the Medina, I keep of walking around the small shops, where I buy some handcrafts (a Moroccan long and chaste blouse and a pair of sandals), and have lunch at the restaurant Granada. The owner, a funny old man (who is also the cook), let me take him a photo, and give me his mail address, so that I can send him our portrait from Italy
Another nice chance encounter, in a silver handcrafts shop, is with a berber guy, who turned out to be one of the actors of the movie “Marrakech Express”… I even shows me some set photos!
My tourist spirit then reaches its peak, when I decide to have an henné done. A nice flower theme on my right foot.
Dinner in one of the cozy restaurants along the main square (this time is 50 Dh all included, because of the central position!) and last shopping tour inside a shop with traditional Moroccan products for the body, actually very similar to any Lush chain store…
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grande tesoro. Foto meravigliose e esperienza da rifare assieme!!!!