Aug 14-15 The Long Journey Down. Part V – Bus to Chefchaouen.

The bus-ride turned out to be a crash-course intro to Morocco in all its glory. When the bus arrived, a stream of passengers descended, while we tried to figure out where the luggage went. We saw a small side door open and a lady tugged a large bag of onions of a rather filthy compartment. We brought our luggage near there, but were redirected to the rear of the vehicle, where a larger compartment meant for baggage was located. The man putting our suitcases in charges us 10Dh a bag – no one else is charged we later realize. Waiting for the bus to leave, a stream of people with random items to sell makes its way through the bus. Tissue packets, biscuits, cigarettes, sweets. These are usually silently offered to each row of passengers, but there is one persistent man who (in French) keeps trying to sell us biscuits and ‘accidentally’ drops them in our laps several times. The bus continues to fill – there are no more seats left, so people stand in the aisles and the back exit stairs.

The long ride there affords us our first glimpse of this country and the countryside. It is hard for me to determine what is normal, what is wasteland, where does poverty begin. Outside the main cities or main thoroughfares, roads and areas around buildings are unpaved. Buildings on the outskirts of the city seem to rise out of large tracts of rubble and it is hard for me to tell whether they are in the midst of being built or destroyed. Moving into more rural areas, you see donkeys, herds of goats, small buildings in dirt fields surrounded by ‘hedges’ of cacti. The cacti are sometimes the only green. There is litter everywhere – uncultivated land is filled with low-growing vegetation all sporting bits of plastic bags that have blown onto them and caught. The only thing in my experience I can relate all this too is rural China.


As the sun sets, there are no streetlamps along the highways. The rocks near the road and the base of trees are painted white, I suppose to catch the headlights. The main highways all over the country are in remarkably good repair though, better than in Canada. I do not know whether they have recently been redone, or if it’s because they don’t go through the yearly freeze-thaw, or because they are subjected to far less traffic.

The only other non-Moroccans on the bus are a small group of young males conversing in Spanish across the aisle from us. I thought they were backpackers, but A’s conversation with the nearest one of them reveals that they are therapists of sorts going to Chefchaouen to teach families and school how to better integrate mentally handicapped children into everyday life. He himself works with MSF and has traveled to South America and Africa for his work and Canada (east coast, west coast) for vacation and to learn about the Natives.

We arrive in Chefchaouen but have no idea where we are in relation to the hotel so we take a taxi. We later realize that the bus had dropped us off in the center of town rather than the bus station on the outskirts and that the hotel was all of 150m down the street. But, we had safely found our first hotel in Morocco and we still couldn’t believe that we had made the last 24 hours happen.

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