Chefchaouen Diaries: True blue
Trying to find the bluest blue in Morocco's very blue town
The day starts quietly. This is because my only company in the tour van - apart from the driver, of course - is a French couple. All my collected experience of France and the French cannot bring me to the conclusion that the French do not like to chat. I have been to France many times and have seen and heard the French talking. I have confirmed that they have been known, on occasion, to chit chat.
But something happens to the French when they get to Morocco. They go completely quiet. You can’t get a word out of them. A surprisingly large part of my time in Morocco is spent in the company of French people who barely make a sound. I mean in my direction generally but often also the fellow French people around them. They’re on holiday from their lives but also from their voice boxes.
The two non-speakers joining me on my tour to Chefchaouen are an enormous Frenchman who turns out to be a former marine, and his also quite muscly but presumably non-marine girlfriend. They do on occasion find reason to speak to one another but generally they spend the day looking surly.
Things liven up eventually. When we arrive in Chefchaouen we are joined by another enormous man, and this man’s wife. The second enormous man is American, a highly-ranked army official currently working at the embassy in Rabat.
So two couples, both containing men who look like they can take on the entire town of Chefchaouen single-handedly, and me. Oh, and the guide, who turns up late. No one in Morocco ever seems to be on time, and this includes the tour guides, who will undoubtedly leave you in the dust of their fancy tour vans if you deign to be late for them.
This guide though is incredibly impressive, to me at least. Once he realises he has two French people on his tour, he decides he will say everything in both English and French. This only seems to impress me. It succeeds not in including the French couple but in irritating them instead. They can speak French and so why can’t we do the tour in French? It isn’t that impressive to the Americans either, as they also speak French. I do not, or at least only in a très vaguement kind of way.
But eventually, with all prospect of tour group harmony in tatters thanks to our linguistic divide, we make our way into the medina. Chefchaoeun, for those who don’t know or haven’t looked at any of the pictures accompanying this post, is mainly blue. That is, the buildings are all painted blue, and this, basically, is the primary reason people visit.
There aren’t many blue places in the world but Chefchaoeun makes up for the rest. It’s really blue. Most of the medina is blue but some buildings are more blue than others. Some are a deep, rich blue, a particularly bluey blue. Soon a tour around Chefchaouen becomes a quest to see the bluest blue, or at the very least the most picturesque blue.
This quest actually turns out to be quite easy since the most picturesque parts of Chefchaouen, the most blue, are where the most tourists are. These parts of the town, despite being actual streets and alleys that people use, become essentially attractions that people queue up at. The queue is formed not to see the street in question but to stand in it, to be photographed there, to be able to have a photo that says “I have completed the blue quest.”
It’s churlish to complain about tourists in Chefchaouen, especially when you are one. Chefchaouen certainly isn’t complaining. We stop at one square to shake hands with a man of great local importance. Our guide, it has become clear by this point, can speak both English and French but neither particularly well. So it isn’t quite clear who this man is or what makes him of such local importance. But he is important and he thanks us for visiting his town. As he speaks some boys are daubing more blue paint on a wall that looks like it has so much blue paint on it that it’s reached a point of oversaturation. It has reached peak blue and yet the boys think it needs more.
But then since Chefchaouen’s main point of interest is that it’s blue, why wouldn’t you make it more so? It’s perhaps the one town in the world which will never need to complain of over-tourism. Not because there aren’t enough tourists - there are, there are loads, the town practically has an infestation - but because should the town ever get tired of being a tourist trap it needs only to stop painting everything blue. Get out the tins of white paint and slap it on the walls and suddenly there will be no reason for us all to be here. It can be just another pretty town in the mountains again.
But they don’t seem tired of tourists. Our tour continues and becomes more about money the longer it goes on. There is a trip to a baker - every tour in Morocco takes you to a baker - a tip is needed for his bread, of course. A trip to a shop full of argan oil, the whole of Morocco is soaking in argan oil! You can’t move for the stuff and yet it is hideously expensive. And of course a trip to a carpet shop. We sip tea and watch the Americans consider, and then reject, about eighteen carpets. At one point they seem close to buying one, but of course we leave empty-handed. The shopkeeper’s mistake, it is obvious to me, is that none of his wares are blue.
And then we are shuffled into a restaurant that is clearly expecting us. Well, they are and they aren’t. They are expecting us in that they know the tour will finish at their establishment and that they will be expected to feed us, but there are no tables of five. We insist on sitting together. We have endured an awkward few hours together in the town with a simultaneously multi-lingual and no-lingual guide, and we have earned an awkward group dinner. But it can’t be done. There are simply no tables of five. Well, there is that one in the corner, but it’s booked in two hours. Our bus leaves in less than two hours but no, the table cannot be ours.
The Americans are pushed towards a table of two and the French couple and I downstairs. Disaster. I cannot sit with the French couple. I cannot endure more silence. I cannot spend an hour pathetically miming my life story. I’ll have to dive out of a window.
The American man comes to the rescue. “We’ll be the three,” he says, pointing to me. We sit down and I am enormously, overzealously thankful. They seem nice and welcoming and not only do they speak English but they are willing to converse in it too. “Well, I just thought,” the American man says, “if you had to sit with them, it’d be quite a quiet lunch.”
“You have no idea.”
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Perfectly captured sentiments. They dynamics of those tours are sometimes a bit odd, all those cultures and expectations jumbling together into a bus. But we've also met some really great people that way. It's a roll of the dice. I also ran into the world's friendliest American in Chefchaouen, he came up to me at a restaurant and we chatted amicably for a while and then he tried to sell me drugs.
Another funny thing I've noticed is that my old photos of Chefchaouen, which I took on a crappy film camera, make the blue look much paler than I now see in social media posts. This makes me wonder if 1) they repainted the town in a darker blue, or 2) modern phone cameras are just much better at capturing vibrant colours now. Maybe a bit of both.
You must have found the only silent French in the country, lol! I suspect the couple had a tiff (sounds like a Moroccan word...) ...