Tarifa, Grenada, Alhambra, Cabo de Gata

Click here to see the entire Tarifa, Grenada, Alhambra, Cabo de Gato album  

There are some cool photos that didn't fit in this post! 

We left off having just boarded our ferry from Tangiers to Tarifa. It was a really beautiful day and a calm crossing. It was pretty interesting getting to cross the Straight of Gibraltar and to see the two continents at once. You can see it in this picture if you look closely! 

We spent 3 and a bit days in Tarifa. It is the southernmost point in Europe and is known worldwide as the place to be for wind and kite surfing. Because it is right on the Straight of Gibraltar, you can actually swim in both the Mediterranean and Atlantic oceans with only a 3 minute walk in between. We had a wonderful AirBnb Apartment in Tarifa, only a 5 minute walk to the beach. We spent our first few days just sleeping, lounging on the beach, swimming and catching up on internet things and planning for the next stage of our trip. We both found we were pretty exhausted from the fun but packed itinerary in Morocco. The first day and half there were tons of kite and wind surfers and it was really fun watching them do jumps and glide along with the wind. The last half of the time, there were hardly any. We took the opportunity to spend a whole afternoon making a series of giant holes in the beach all connected with moats and rivers. It was wonderfully relaxing! 

We reluctantly left our beach haven of Tarifa, to head to Granada. After quite a bit of research at our apartment, we determined the best way to get around Spain would be driving. So we took a bus and taxi ride to a very interesting, very German resort just past Gibraltar to rent a Smart car. Our backpacks just fit in the trunk, but it was a great little car and we had a great time driving around for the next few weeks. 

We stopped by Nerja on the way, which is known as the "balcony of Europe." It certainly had a great view, and was a very cute little town. We were able to secure our tickets to go see Alhambra the next day from there, as well as enjoy the view over lunch. 

click here to watch the full video

We spent the night in Granada. We found a small hostel type hotel downtown. Once we dropped off all our stuff, we went to explore the city, since we only really had the evening there. One thing we found amazing was this one square that was full of birds! We started to hear them a few blocks away and couldn't believe our eyes and ears when we came upon it. This video is just a small taste of it. Jerome had found a restaurant he really wanted to try out, but it happened to be closed for a private party. We ended up finding a pretty cool and tasty tapas restaurant though which was almost empty, but had great food and service. We headed back to our hotel happy and tired after having a long day of traveling, only to find our laundry soap had leaked all over one of our backpacks. Being in a hostel type place, we had to try and rinse out as much as we could in a shared bathroom and hope it would all dry in time to check out early in the morning. We hung everything on the tiny balcony and got into bed, and then we heard the rain start to pour... So we gathered it all in and re-hung it in our room, and were glad we'd brought so many extra plastic bags. At least we knew everything in the bag was very clean! 

We were up early to check out and make our way to Alhambra the next morning. We packed up our soggy belongings and headed out. Alhambra is an amazing palace built in the 1300's. It is amazingly impressive and we took a ton of pictures, which you can see more of here. 

The architecture and details are exquisite. And it has quite the impressive history as well. One of the rooms inside is where Christopher Columbus got the okay to sail off and end up discovering America! We spent the good part of the day there checking out the palace and amazing gardens. Once we were done being impressed, we grabbed our bags and car and headed to Cabo de Gata Natural Park. It has a very unique landscape, almost desert like which is quite a change from the surroundings. It has great beaches and hiking, which is why we chose to stop by. 

The first day after we swam at one of the beaches, we saw this crazy cool light in the sky. Our guess was it was a unusual combination of rainbow and sunset. 

We spent an afternoon and full day here, enjoying the unusual desert beaches and trails. This was what we thought was a deserted fort along the "Pirate Smugglers Path" hiking trail, only to see these three giant dogs guarding it from the roof. Check out our album to see some more pictures from the Park. You can see in the map below that we covered most of the bottom coast of Spain over this week. In the next post we head northwest all the way to San Sebastian. 

View Jerome and Laura's Trip to Europe in a larger map

Shades of Chefchaouen

 Click here to see our entire Chefchaouen Album

After visiting Meknes and Fez, we headed of to the much smaller town of Chefchaouen which is famous for it's blue buildings. Above you can see the famous blue door by the side of the road that lets you know  you're almost there. We stayed in a quaint little riad in the town where the inside was all painted in blue also. We spent the first day there just exploring the town, and taking lots of pictures of the pretty blue doors and buildings throughout the town. It was really fun to explore with tons of narrow hallway like roads and stairs and dead ends. The main part of the old town is pedestrian only, and we spent hours meandering around. There's a river running through the town, and they have a washing area by it all set up with concrete washboards under little canopies.

The town is in the Rif mountains and we climbed up part of the side of it to a small church which had an amazing view of the town and the sunset. We had a nice dinner with Red and Sabine and after dinner walked a bit around the newer part of town, and stopped at a cafe to drink tea and observe. There was a big soccer game on that everyone was huddled into the cafes to watch, so we had an easy time getting an outside seat, and enjoying the excitement of the game from afar. There was also a wedding in town, and there was a sort of parade of all the cars involved who drove past us and all around the town at least 3 or 4 times honking all the way. 

The following day we set out to see the Pont de Dieu or God's bridge. We drove about an hour to a tiny village I guess you could call it. There was a restaurant where we ate breakfast, a few houses, an auberge for hikers and that was about it. While we were eating breakfast Red asked around and found a local man who was willing to lead us on the hike to the Pont de Dieu. We had two options, the high way or the low way. We could only do one, and opted for the low way as he said it was more interesting, and you could only do it at some times of the year when the water wasn't too high. So we set off.

The hike was all along this beautiful crystal clear river which had all sorts of little waterfalls and pools in it. It was amazing. We had to hike right along the river edge, and cling to boulders to try to stay dry. This was in vain though as we had to cross the river at one point, and all our shoes got wet anyways. It was a really fun hike and the scenery was truly amazing. There were one or two other groups along the way, but we were mostly on our own. 

The hike probably took an hour and a half to get to the Pont de Dieu. We were pretty glad we took the low road, as we had a great view of the "Bridge" which is a pretty reddish rock bridge over the river. We saw lots of people at the top having taken the high road, but I don't think they'd have near the views we did. It was really impressive. Jerome wanted to check it out even closer, so he gave me his camera and wallet and passport, and dove right into the water to go see! 

Since he was already soaking wet, he decided to see if he could make it all the way back to the village in the river. And proceeded to swim and make his way down waterfalls and jump into pools all the way back, as happy as a clam! The rest of us retraced our steps, and enjoyed watching his antics! 

After the hike we had a late lunch at the same restaurant while Jerome worked on drying off in the sun. We spent our last evening in Morocco and with Sabine and Red back in Chefchaouen. We spent the early evening again wandering the city and taking more blue pictures. The next morning we packed up and headed to Tangiers, where Jerome and I bought tickets for the ferry to Tarifa, Spain and said goodbye to Sabine and Red who were heading back to Casablanca. It was a beautiful sunny day and the ferry ride was really pretty. We crossed the Straight of Gibraltar and waved goodbye to Morocco! 

Click here to see our entire Chefchaouen Album

Click here to see the map of our trip

Meknes and Fez

Click here to see our entire Meknes and Fez album (51 pictures)

We left off last time arriving in Meknes to meet up with Sabine and Red. We stayed at the beautiful and lovely Riad Amazigh in the Medina. It has the most unassuming front door, and an exquisite interior! You can see here, including the giant door to our room and the balcony to the main sitting area.

We really enjoyed Meknes. We spent the first day exploring the medina which is an endless maze of small roads. It was much less touristy than Marakesh. The market areas were all meant for and busy with locals doing their errands and bustling to and fro.

We saw many neat things like barrels of gooey black soap and sugar cones. The black soap was very common and we tried it out at the riad. It has a very gooey texture. The sugar cones we'd seen in pieces in the desert broken into pieces for tea. But here we saw the full cones which Red had been telling us about.

The most unusual thing we saw though was at a butcher's shop just around the corner from our Riad. The butchers in Morocco like to keep their choice cuts of meat out on the counter for you to see, despite not having refrigerated counters. We saw this everywhere we had been, and were quite used to it. This particular butcher however wanted to stand out even more from his competition. He did this by having a camel head on display at the corner of his booth. It definitely helped us from getting lost in the maze of streets when we were trying to get back at night, we just looked for the camel head and made a left! It took us until the last night to get the courage to ask him if we could have a picture.

We really enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere and the feel of the city. In the afternoon we hired a local guide recommended to us by the Riad to take us to some places we might not have found. He took us to the garment district, to meet some weavers, and to a museum where we saw some interesting artifacts. He then took us to a series of shops where we got most of our souvenirs from Morocco. Having Red with us who was from Morocco and who spoke Arabic, made a lot of the transactions go more smoothly than when we had tried to bargain for things on our own. We bought a plate from a an artist who specialized in silver damascene which is special to Meknes. It involves scratching steel and then embedding fine strands of silver into it to make patterns.  Red also helped us get a great deal on our rug. You can see both of these in our Packing list post.

You can see the detail of the damascene in this close up view

The next day we headed off to Fes. We saw some really interesting things there. We visited the University of Al-Karaouine which was founded in 859 and is in the Guinness book of world records as the oldest running university in the world! It had the most intricate and beautiful stone and wood carved details in the courtyard we were in. 

Just outside of the school was the ancient water clock known as Dar al Magana. Which was built in the 1300s and had a complicated mechanism of using water and weights to keep track of the time. It was dismantled at some point, and there are efforts to restore it, but it is not an easy task.

We found a young man who offered to take us around the city and show us some sites. He was very good and told us some history, but had to go somewhere and so passed us on to his friend who wasn't nearly as good and just walked us around without saying much, and tried to take us to shops which we had told him we weren't interested in. Out final stop was tea at a little cafe with a view of the blue gate or the Bab Bou Jeloud which is another beautiful example of the craftsmanship and architecture of the area.

Click here to see our entire Meknes and Fez album (51 pictures)