{"id":418,"date":"2012-01-09T13:25:26","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T21:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/?p=418"},"modified":"2012-01-09T13:25:26","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T21:25:26","slug":"chefchaouen-morocco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/words\/chefchaouen-morocco\/","title":{"rendered":"Chefchaouen, Morocco"},"content":{"rendered":"

After our time in Asilah<\/a>, Jane and I headed on to Chefchaouen. A lovely everything-painted-blue town in the Rif Mountains, and apparently one of the hashish capitols of the world. When we stopped in town to try and figure out where our guesthouse was (quite a ways out of the main part of town, and a challenge to find), we were offered “best-quality, double-A” several times within about ten minutes. And it didn’t really let up the whole time we were there.<\/p>\n

Again, we spent several days here – one day exploring the city (and then getting rather lost trying to walk home again after dark), and another doing a day-trip into the mountains, in hopes of hiking into a theoretically-beautiful gorge. Sadly, we’d gotten a late-ish start, and then stopped for a leisurely lunch – food being a big bond between us – resulting in us realizing we’d be hiking back down in the dark if we tried to make it all the way up to the gorge. A lovely day nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Despite its out-of-the-way location, our guesthouse was fun. Owned by Terry and Suzanne, a witty Scottish expat couple, it felt more like staying in the home of new friends than my previous guesthouse experiences. They’d recently begun experimenting with making their own hooch – it being an hour drive to the closest spot to by alcohol – with water, sugar and some super-high-octane yeast. We tried it with juice, lemons, tonic – but my favorite creation was mixing it with hot black tea. Sort of a poor man’s hot toddy. They were also big fans of the aforementioned local agricultural products – you can imagine that with this combination there was lots of humorous, rambling conversation.<\/p>\n

Actually, backing up a bit: as we were leaving Asilah, Nabil mentioned that we should stop at one of the roadside barbecue stands on the road to Chaouen (as the locals call it). We did so. It took a little while to orient ourselves, what with the multiple hanging carcasses, big open grill area, a butcher-shop window and a separate restaurant area for “other” – salads, frites, drinks, etc. We ended up ordering 200g of lambchops, 200g of viande hachee (ground meat, again lamb in this case), a salade marocaine (diced tomatoes, onions, cucumber), fries and a bowl of olives. None of it was outstanding, as you might expect, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable roadside dining experience.<\/p>\n

[riding two-up]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After our time in Asilah, Jane and I headed on to Chefchaouen. A lovely everything-painted-blue town in the Rif Mountains, and apparently one of the hashish capitols of the world. When we stopped in town to try and figure out where our guesthouse was (quite a ways out of the main part of town, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}