Hasslers and Hashish

As we mentioned previously, Chefchaouen is a stunning blue town in northern Morocco.  

The only way to reach it is by car or bus. Getting here was definitely an experience.  We were the only English speakers on the packed bus, whose suspension and shock absorbers failed about 10 years ago.  Unfortunately, the bouncy ride did nothing to help the stomach of the man next to Paul who was vomiting into a plastic bag.  The bus basically acted as a mobile souk, with merchants briefly running aboard to sell cookies, watches, wallets, plastic card holders, and chains at every stop.

Located in the Rif (pronounced “reef”) mountains, Chefchaouen’s climate is perfect for growing marijuana, and a 2013 U.N. report listed the Rif mountain area as one of the top two producers of hashish worldwide.  (Rif like reefer?)  We couldn’t walk more than five minutes there, without being offered “smoke? hashish? flower power?”

At first we thought we were being targeted because we are clearly tourists, but then realized that this is the norm, and that the majority of men smoke hash.  Our trekking guide, let’s call him Aziz, had 3 joints during lunch. 

The crazy thing, is that despite having every type of drug (heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and other drugs we haven’t even heard of before) at our fingertips, if we were so inclined, we couldn’t find any alcohol.

Liquor stores do not exist, and only three establishments sell beer or wine.  Two of those will only serve customers who dine there for meals, while the third is an incredibly shady bar.  But even that bar wouldn’t sell us beer until nighttime (we were trying to buy one beer each to enjoy while watching the sunset from the guesthouse’s rooftop terrace), so we had an unintentional period of abstinence.

We had one experience that soured our opinion of Chefchaouen.

As we walked towards our guesthouse a few hours after our trek, we were intercepted on the street by a guy named Mohammed (of course), who rambled on about our tour guide Aziz, needing money.  Truthfully, we hadn’t had enough cash on us to pay for the trek in its entirety, so Aziz, who worked at the hotel, told us just to leave the money at the front desk and he would collect it the following day.  But here was Mohammed was saying “Aziz is nearby, and told me to find you.  He needs the money you owe him. He sent me to hotel and said find the guy and lady and get the money.”  He then specified the amount that we owed Aziz and mentioned that we had gone on the waterfall trek with him earlier in the day.

Now, this seemed shady to us, but the guy knew enough details that it was plausible.  Plus, Aziz didn’t speak English too well, and fearing that maybe we had misunderstood his directions that he would get the money from the hotel tomorrow, we didn’t want him to think that we were cheating him out of his cash.

So, we told Mohammed that we would not give him the money, but we would go with him to give the cash to Aziz personally.  Before doing so, we locked our phones, wallets and valuables in our room, and split the cash between us.  Then, we followed Mohammed as he led us all through the twisting streets, keeping a safe distance behind him in case we needed to make a run for it.  All the while, he was rambling about how Aziz needed the money and his “big mother” (grandmother) was sick and he was with her right now.  

Finally he led us to a street with an archway leading who knows where at the end, and he said Aziz was just inside with his family and he would bring the money to him.  Obviously, we resolutely refused to give him the money until we saw Aziz.  The guy disappeared into the archway – there was no way in hell we were leaving the well lit street- to get Aziz.

When he came back, alone, and blathered on and on about Aziz’s grandmother, who is 86 years old and dying, we basically ignored him and said we were only giving the money to Aziz in person.  This process of him going in and out of the doorway occurred 2 more times until it was clear to him that we weren’t giving the money up, and clear to us that we needed to get the hell out of there.

At that point he said Aziz was crying too much to come out, and he gave him his bank card to get the money, so let’s go ATM, then tried to lead us in a different direction than the way we had come, so we politely told him to f*#% off and bolted back to our room to check that nothing had been messed with in our absence (we may have been overly paranoid, but we had read about items being stolen from our guesthouse).

This situation definitely could have ended worse, although we brought only the small amount of money owed to Aziz with us, leaving everything else of value behind, and made sure we were never close enough to Mohammed to believe he could have physically hurt us.

Writing about it makes it seem like we were idiots to go with him in the first place, but at the time, the confusion caused by the language barrier instilled enough doubt in us to be plausible that we had misunderstood Aziz’s directions.

Thankfully we stuck with our gut feelings that Mohammed was trying to scam us, and took a few precautions.  It chills me a bit that Mohammed knew certain details about us, including where we were staying, the name of our tour guide and the amount we owed him.

We know Morocco is a poor country, and many of its citizens are desperate.  We understand that people go to great lengths to scam wealthier foreigners out cash in order to meet their needs.  Nevertheless, it was a lousy feeling.  No one was hurt, and no money was lost, but it left us with a bad taste in our mouths.

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Beer of choice: None. Couldn’t obtain any.