After our visits with the sisters in Oujda, it was time to take a road trip and see more of Morocco. We caught the train in Oujda and spent a long day traveling across the country to Fez.
We spent one night in Fez and took an early evening sprint through the Medina.
This was a huge complex, much of it closed already, but definitely somewhere that’s on the list of places for a return visit when more time is available.
Then it was back on the train for a trip up the coast. The trains in Morocco remind me very much of the trains in Europe that Erin and I traveled on in the early 80’s. They were clean, efficient, and on time. Our destination was to the city of Tangier, then we took a taxi to Tetuan where Khadija lives with her husband and daughter. We stayed at her house for 4 days.
The Medina in Tetuan is much smaller than Fez but we had a rainy day to spend wandering through the shops and finding a few small gifts and treasures.
One of my favorite shops begs the question, which came first? And wonder if the chickens in the back really know what’s going on here?
One day we took a road trip up into the mountains to the town of Chefchaouen. It’s a tourist stop where many of the buildings are painted some shade of blue. The most popular theory for the blue buildings is that after WWII, when the Jewish community in the area grew as people fled Nazi persecution, blue was painted on the walls, floors and steps as a religious practice, to represent the color of the sky and connect the city to heaven and God.
Inside the walls of the city is Kasbah Chefchaouen, a fortress that was built in 1471 by Rachid Ben Ali to protect the city. This is the view of the gardens within the Kasbah and the city beyond. You can see the city walls still exist at the upper edge.
The last stop in Morocco was an overnight in Tangier. Khadija went back home to Tetuan and Lynn stayed in her room, so I took a walk along the beach at sunset. I was hoping to have time to check out the marina for an upcoming visit by friends, but was not energetic enough to negotiate the lack of French or Arabic with the taxi drivers.
This lovely woman was also out enjoying the sunset. We didn’t speak a common language but she understood I wanted a picture and approved.
I was not paying attention behind me and almost was run over by a string of camels. How often can you say that?
Our trip home was a rather tortured route, with another overnight stop in Madrid. But it was business class on Aer Lingus through Dublin and over the top back home to Seattle.
Morocco pix are Here
