The whole point of taking the evening bus was so that A. could go to class, but she didn’t and we were still almost late. We had enough food to feed a small village in Africa plus the first day of a moderately-sized Indian wedding party. We proceeded to Granada without incident, except for the part of not being able to locate the Bolsilla de Santa Paula: particularly because it was a street and not actually a saint’s pocket.
Still rubbing the sleep from our eyes and arguing cantankerously about stopping for breakfast, we find a bus stop well populated by Asian tourists that we assumed it would take us to the Alhambra, but we and they were wrong, and it didn’t. I clutched my coffee like a dying person clutches the last piece of chocolate cake thinking happy coffee thoughts as we joined the ticket lines after the short ride up the hill. At 8h20 the lady sold us tickets for the 8h30 entry to the palace, and we galloped off over the cobblestones, dodging elderly tourists like walker-wielding obstacles.
View over Granada from the Alhambra
In barely two and a half hours we’d finished the Alhambra complex, palaces, gardens and all. It helped we were early, it helped we’d declined the audio guides, and it helped that the weather wasn’t too inviting, and that we were also not trailing small children. Still the Alhambra is gorgeous. It’s Moorish architecture, full of vaulted ceilings, mosaics, carvings and the beautiful arches that swept gracefully over fountained courtyards. If I’m ever rich and famous I’ll buy me a castle like that. Somehow, we imagined it would be huge instead of just big. It could have been Tuscany, for all we could tell. Perhaps we took the wrong bus?
Confronted with hedges the size of moving trucks, it’s easy to see the appeal. It’s like being a kid again, playing hide and seek among the labyrinthian trees. Imagine a hundred years ago, these hedges, these gardens. Orange trees and pomegranate trees are interspersed with flowers and hedges. A lumbering tour group of the newly wed, overfed and nearly dead obstruct the path, and we duck around the corner, and I admire a handsome Italian framed against the foliage – and soon we are free. There is a window in the gardens, set high in one of the many terraces and flanked by columns. From here, as from many places in the Alhambra, you can see the city spread gently across the hilltops. In the distance, the Sierra Nevadas; on the hill, a church; in between, pueblos blancos and new, ugly apartment blocks.
We spent the afternoon staggering from tapas bar to tapas bar. At one point, lost, looking the map, the stranger who stopped to help turned out to be none other than a childhood acquaintance. Small frigging world.
We sat on the bench in the sun. We’d just received complete and through advice on “Au Maroc” from the energetic Frenchman at the creperie on plaza de la universitad. The other half of the bench was occupied by a young Spanish guy, a future teacher looking (as of yet unsuccessfully) for a job, with friendly eyes and floppy hair, who wanted to know just why one needed the interrogative ‘do’ for the question ‘do you understand?’ and not just ‘you understand?’
I wonder how much a tapas bar represents the normal population – or what demographic thereof – in Grenada or elsewhere. It’s an undeniably social outing, but one which doesn’t perforce replace family togetherness.
Our attempt to get to Algeciras was doomed from the start. Direct bus, full. So we had tostadas and went for Málaga. Next bus was full, so we whiled away the time in an internet café where A. made friends with the shaved-headed Serbian involved in shady business in Barcelona. Finally, after a brief but notable delay near Algecrias, caused by the apparent but un-evident breakdown of our bus five minutes from the bus station, during which one grandmother complained incessantly, we followed a Moroccan couple and three Walesian hitchhikers (…into the bar, and the bartender asked, “what is this, some kind of a joke?”) to find all the ferries delayed. Thus: a nice night in the enchanting and beautiful little port town of Algeciras (read: it’s a shoddy dump with sketchy people. We stayed in.)
Entrée au Maroc
We decided to head to and through Ceuta—the Spanish enclave—rather than Tangiers, to save ourselves some time and the hassle. The ferry embarkment proceeded without problem, and we spent much of the ride taking the micky out of other passengers, with the desperate hope that none of them spoke German – but these were Americans, so I doubt it. Americans, as is widely known, do not learn foreign languages.
“The bus to the border is the Number 7. It costs 75 cents.” With our packs on our backs, looking somewhat muddled and confused, a man standing behind us interrupted our thoughts. Not only did this man know everyting there was to know about the bus and the border, he even took us to a money changer and deposited us at the bus station. “Remember: Number 7. You see number 9, you don’t go. You see number 7, you go.”
Ceuta, the Spanish enclave carved out of Morocco, is understandably a mixture of Spain/Europe and Morocco/North Africa. Distinctly Mediterranean, rougher around the edges, but with far more flair than Algeciras. The people look north African, the cars are Spanish., and across from the bus stop are the remnants of the old fortress: imposing battlements jutting out of the blue water. A construction worker dangling into the canal waved as he saw me taking pictures.
The border: the end of the line and we all pile out. Everyone’s on foot, most people don’t have baggage and anyways we’re pretty much the only northern European-looking people there It’s several hundred yards/meters to and through the border. A tall fence blocks off the ocean; to our right, the hillside. Cars and lorries are variously parked along rough lanes of concrete barriers. A chain link fence sometimes cordons off the pedestrians from the cars, and we trudge along behind large headscarved women and packs of young men. As our “guide” from before described it, we were “walking from Europe to Africa.”
Apparently pedestrians and cars were checked at the same guardposts, but there didn’t seem to be anything approaching a queue or any kind of order. Only once we were forced to go through a little gate to the side. The actual stampring process was uncomplicated but took awhile, seeing as how they were likely using the same computer system for the last hundred and twenty years. Two bored-looking functionaries with large moustaches like small furry animals and some kind of stinky incence typed mysterious numbers into a computer system apparently running DOS. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, and ma salaama! A further bored-looking guard wanted to see in my bag, but came disinterested after he heard I spoke French. “Vouz avez des armes?” he asked me. Do I have weapons? Do they ask this question to everyone, or only 20-something female white backpackers?
Taxi to Tétouan cost 120 DH, prix fixé. Our driver had blue eyes and spoke Spanish, but wore the Arab striped kaftan and deposited us at the bus station with little commentary. Tétouan was not the sleepy little town I’d imagined, but rather a big, sprawling thing, outgrowing its borders like a giant jam smear. As soon as we entered the station, we were accosted by an ostensible employee with no teeth who pretended to be insulted that we were anything but thrilled with him forcing his ‘help’ on us, and helpfully interrupting our consultation in every possible language he knew. Anyways, it was noon, and apparently the next bus was at three (a likely storey, but okay), but he disappeared and magically reappeared with three Frenchies (were they on special, buy one get two free?) with whom we shared the taxi.
They negotiated the fare (40 DH per person, and we split the cost of the sixth seat), and squeezed into the back. “En effet, la sixième place, où est-elle?” I asked, as A. was practically sitting in my lap. Our “guide” wanted backsheesh, but I let the French guy argue with him and contented myself with sucking my gut in and trying to make my hips smaller to accommodate everyone. The ride was spectacular: rolling hillsides, farms, fields and animals, and with a chain of fog-covered mountains to our perpetual left. Little villages dotted the landscape here and there, and it was all as pastoral and bucolic as a 16th century Dutch painting. The driver drove like his car was on fire AND someone was trying to steal his bobblehead, dodging lorries and busses as if in a slalom. I contemplated the screw—what remained of the door lock—the missing door latch and the screwdriver jammed in apparently to keep the window from falling down, and wandered if anything was keeping the door shut as we were thrown around the corners and I against the door.
Chefchaouen is apparently the weed capital of Morocco, and as soon as we get out of the cab someone was already pushing. We declined and trotted off after the Frenchies. Their hotel was nice but full; the one next door was confusingly priced: 50 DH/person for a shared private room or 70 DH per person for a bed in a dorm, and had only one room for one night but could maybe let us sleep on the roof. No, thank you. So we ended up at the hotel we had wanted to go anyways, where the quixotic owner insisted on his broken German and we on our respective Spanish and French, which he spoke considerably better.
A doorway in Chefchaouen
Apparently the square around the castle thing is a giant tourist trap. We’d heard about a couple of recommended restaurants, but the directios were useless so we wandered out of the square to find something, anything – and ended up at the recommended restaurant anyways! There we met three girls from the Basque country in Spain, and after lunch we migrated for tea and coffee, with a mixed Spanish/English/German discussion on pretty much everything.
Besides the marijuana, Chefchaouen is renowned for its beautiful blue medina. The walls, the stairs, everything is painted a stunning and varying shade of cobalt and azure blue, so after sending off Las Españolas we wandered about until we found some shoes and some picnic snacks for dinner.
I guess you could say I didn’t get much out of the first / only full day in Chefchaouen: right away I was hit with a fantastic bout of Funny Tummy / Touristas / whatever you want to call it, and was as feeble as your grandmother without her walker. It didn’t help that someone yelling in Russian, which subsided briefly after I pounded on the wall with my fist, interrupted both the night before and the early morning. Honestly.
Anyways, the whole “being sick” thing resulted in me looking as if someone were pulling my teeth without anesthetic while I turned a lovely shade of green. It was like high school biology all over again. I got to schlep myself up and down the medina, culminating in the crowning moment when I “redecorated” the pavestones in front of the café. Being sick, at least this kind of sick, is like walking around with a very heavy blanket. Everything is a huge effort, and sometimes the edges get fuzzy. It could have been the dates, or the olives, or more likely just a random fluke. I’d made it through most of Asia with no problem, so I guess it was my turn.
We met Las Españolas for lunch and tea, which means they had lunch and I had nothing, looking about as green as my mint tea. We took our tea at the smaller plaza within the medina. From somewhere, loud Arabic pop music was blaring, and somewhere behind us, a backgammon or cards game progressed loudly, eagerly followed by a crowd of young men. We sat outside on the square in the sun with the other tourists (as a side note, that’s a good way to spot a tourist at a hundred yards: tourists sit in the sun, locals in the shade), including a pack of Argentineans who communicated with walkie talkie and insisted on filming strange things. Everywhere young men. The plaza was picturesque and almost empty. The young guy seated on the step stood out starkly against the whitewashed walls, and we sipped our over-sweetened mint tea.
As expected, I slept away the afternoon, and the evening, and well into the next day like a drugged puppy at the pet store. How to tell I’m sick: I sleep for fifteen hours straight. However, this is a poor diagnostic tool as this feat is nothing special for your average university student. Because Las Españolas had helpfully fetched our bus tickets the night before, we had time to meet for breakfast before heading to the gare routière.
Up behind the medina, through twisting alleys where the day before we had seen three tiny newborn kittens, carefully watched over by several respectively tiny children (“ils sont nos chats!”), up behind the tourist shops I suppose the residents live, though it’s hard to tell if the place isn’t simply one giant tourist bazaar. Signs of inhabitants exist; there are alleys with no tourists, some smelling of dank water, but most or all as lovely; and by the river, a dozen women stand bent over buckets doing their laundry at the metal stands built for this purpose on the banks. They ostensibly have washing machines at home, but as water is so expensive, they prefer to do the washing there.
Another typical Chefchaouen shot
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