Blue Walls and Beggars in Uniform
Morocco Road Trip
We left Fes without regret, drove through valleys that kept changing their mind about what Morocco should look like, got shaken down again by a gendarme with a clipboard and an invention, and ended the day in Chefchaouen, where the streets are blue and the people are not trying to sell you your own shadow.
Breakfast in the riad was the best part of Fes. We shared the table with a French couple and a pair of Spaniards, the easy morning conversation of people who have all independently decided that travel is worth the inconvenience. Good coffee, warm bread, no one trying to redirect us to their cousin’s carpet shop. We were almost sorry to leave the table.
Almost.
The Tanneries
Before leaving we visited the tanneries, the Chouara tannery being the one every visitor ends up at, a working leather operation that has been dyeing hides in the same stone vats since the medieval period. You view it from the terraces of the surrounding shops, looking down at the circles of color below: saffron, poppy red, indigo, the vats arranged like a painter’s palette seen from above. The smell arrives before the view does and stays after you leave. They hand you a sprig of mint at the entrance. It helps, somewhat.
It is genuinely impressive, the scale of it, the age of it, the fact that it still works exactly as it always has. Worth the visit. Worth leaving after twenty minutes.
Out of Fes
Finding the car took longer than finding the tanneries. Getting out of Fes took longer than both. The city’s road logic is its own sovereign system, and it does not feel obligated to explain itself to visitors. We made several wrong turns, navigated several contradictory signs, and eventually found the road north with the quiet relief of people who had not been entirely sure they would.
Once clear of the city, the driving became a genuine pleasure. Every valley on the route north was different: the light changing, the vegetation shifting, the palette of the landscape rotating through ochre and green and grey depending on the hour and the altitude. Morocco from a car window, when no one is trying to stop the car and extract money from it, is excellent.
One detail that accumulated across the day: the color of the buildings and taxis changes per province. Fes had its palette, the next region had another, Chefchaouen its famous blue. It is not something the guidebooks lead with but it is one of those things you notice and cannot stop noticing once you have.
Beggars in Uniform
They stopped us on a straight road with light traffic and no obvious reason for a checkpoint. The gendarme approached with the clipboard energy of a man who has already decided how this ends. The issue he raised was, as best I could determine, invented. The amount he suggested to resolve it without paperwork was 200 MAD.
I paid it. Again. And I am writing it down here because I think it deserves to be written down. These are not underpaid officers in a difficult situation making a difficult call. They are beggars in uniform, operating a toll on a public road, using the apparatus of the state as personal revenue. It is corrosive and cynical and the 200 MAD is not the point. The point is that it happens every day, to everyone who drives through, and it is apparently fine.
It is not fine.
Cats, Dogs, and the Distance Between Them
Morocco loves cats. They are everywhere: in the medinas, on the walls, in the restaurants, treated with the casual affection of animals that belong to the street in the best sense. We watched a young woman in Chefchaouen making her rounds through the alleys with a bag of cat food, stopping at each cluster of strays with the practiced efficiency of someone who does this every day and has no interest in being thanked for it.
Later the same day, on the same road, we saw a man throw rocks at a dog. The dog ran, yelping. The man did not seem angry, exactly, just matter of fact about it, as if this were a reasonable response to the presence of a dog in his vicinity. It was not a big moment. It was an ugly one.
Two animals. One street. Very different fates depending on the species. Travel hands you these contrasts without commentary and lets you sit with them.
Chefchaouen
The approach to Chefchaouen through the Rif Mountains earns the destination. The town sits in a valley between two peaks, and the blue that it is famous for begins before you expect it and is more complete than photographs suggest. Not every wall, but enough of them, in enough shades of blue from pale grey-white to deep cobalt, that the overall effect is genuinely disorienting in the best way.
More importantly, it was friendly. Commercial without being predatory, which after Fes felt like a form of luxury. People in the street said hello without wanting anything. Shop owners were present without being insistent. We walked without being followed, browsed without being cornered, and ate without being redirected to somewhere else. It was, in the most basic sense, just nice.
The evening turned cold fast once the sun dropped behind the mountains. We added layers, found somewhere warm, and stayed out a little longer than was sensible because the blue walls at night, lit by the lamps of the alleys, were too good to leave quickly.
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