The Couscous Chronicles: "Look at the peaks!"

I think I mentioned in a post back in the fall that the translation of the name of a beautiful northern town -- Chefchaouen -- means "look at the peaks." It's apt. The Rif Mountains are lovely; they most certainly ought to be admired. But mountains, as we know, require more than just ogling, and so imagine my excitement when my landlord mentioned two or three months that he belongs to a hiking group. "You can come too, if you can keep up," he offered.

The group is called Randonées dans le Rif (Hiking in the Rif). Every three weeks, an announcement goes out via a sort of blog, and anyone who's interested shows up at 6 am in a central Tetouan plaza to pile into personal cars and head out to the chosen destination. The primary organizer is Mansour, who grew up in Tangier and knows the western Rif like the back of his hand. He even has a book published, called "Découverte à pied des montagnes du Rif occidental" ("Discover the Mountains of the Western Rif on Foot").

I've gone out on two randos now with the group. The first one was unfortunately not worthy of photo documenation, as we were caught in a dense fog the whole time. This second outing, however, was spectacular. After parking the cars in a Chefchaouen parking lot, we caught a ride in a sort of bare bones hummer-esque vehicle about 45 minutes up into the mountains. We started high, climbed higher, then trekked all the way back down to Chaouen. Loooong day: door-to-door 14.5 hours, with about 10 of those on foot.

The group was seven members strong: me + Mansour + five other Moroccans, the youngest of which has 20 some years on me. Standard. I could chat with Mansour in English (he attended the Tangier-American school growing up and speaks the language flawlessly), with Mehdi in Spanish and the others in faltering Arabic. In truth, though, I mainly just soaked in the scenery and let them do the talking. Not that my quietness resulted in any less of a linguistic hodgepodge. Take this fabulous soundbyte, for example: "Mehdi! Ajee ici un minuto wa shoof hada al-mandar!" ("Mehdi! Come here a minute and look at this view!" or: Name! Arabic French Spanish Spanish Arabic Arabic Arabic!) Oh, Morocco, what a forgiving place to be learning various languages at once.

Language practice aside, I am really just excited to be meeting some like-minded folks here in Tetouan. It sounds like there will be one or two more randos coming up, followed by a July-August-early September hiatus to avoid the heat. (This seasonality -- summers off -- was the same way in Spain, and it cracked me up there too: what a difference from back home, where often the only sufficiently snow-free months that you CAN hike are July, August and September!) I hope to get out with them again in June, cultivate some of the friendships I've made in the off-season and then resume trompage in the fall. For now, though, "look at the peaks!"

Another difference besides weather is the general lack of trails. There were a couple that we managed to find and follow, but the day principally consisted of trailblazing and bushwhacking. Fun, until Hour 3 of it.