The Last Three Days: Blue, White, and Home
Morocco Road Trip
Chefchaouen deserved a full day. Asilah deserved a stop. Tangier deserved the best room of the trip. And then it was over.
Chefchaouen, Properly
We stayed. That was the whole plan, and it was the right one.
After days of early alarms, long drives, and cities that required constant vigilance, a day with no agenda felt almost radical. We walked the medina without purpose, found coffee and tea when we wanted it, and let the blue streets do what they do when you are not rushing through them.
We posted our Postcrossing cards. After Marrakech’s man in a chair and whatever approximation of official channels we had found in Essaouira, I was glad to drop them into a real postbox and trust the system for once. Somewhere, eventually, a stranger will open their letterbox and find a card from the blue city in the Rif Mountains. I like that thought.
The food continued to be good in the uncomplicated way it is when a place is not catering only to tourists. We ate well, walked more than we had planned to, and went to bed without having achieved anything in particular. Exactly as we planned it.
It was one of the better days of the trip, we both agreed on.
Asilah, Tangier, and the Best Room So Far
We drove from Chefchaouen toward Tangier with the Atlantic appearing somewhere along the way, grey and large and reassuring after days of inland driving. We stopped in Asilah on the way, a small whitewashed town that wears its Portuguese history quietly and its street art loudly. We had coffee, walked the ramparts, and stood in front of murals that had no business being that good on a wall that small. Asilah suits an hour perfectly: small enough to feel complete, pretty enough to make you wish you had booked a night.
Tangier was where we ended, and it delivered more than I had expected. The riad room was the best of the entire trip: high ceilings, real light, the kind of space that makes you immediately recalculate how much time you have left and whether you can justify staying longer. We could not, but we had it for a night, and I was not taking it for granted.
We went to bed early, satisfied, with one more early start ahead.
The Long Way Home
The alarm again. We drove to the airport in the early morning, making a last stop at one of the coffee carts along the way. I’ll miss those. We returned the rental car without ceremony, checked in, cleared immigration, and got on the plane. Brussels by air. Antwerp by train.
There is a specific feeling that comes with the last leg of a long trip. I sat on the train with my suitcase in the aisle and nine days of Morocco still running through my head. The desert silence. The Atlas in the dark. The blue walls of Chefchaouen. The beggars in uniform on the open road. The man in the chair with the stamps. The camel that made its own decision.
Morocco did not leave me neutral. It is too various, too contradictory, too alive for that. The beautiful and the frustrating arrived together throughout, rarely announcing in advance which was which.
We were home by afternoon. The suitcases went straight to the washing machine. The postcards were already somewhere in the postal system, moving slowly toward strangers who had not asked for them but would, we hoped, be glad they arrived.
That is the whole point, really. Of the postcards. Of the trip.
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