I can't believe we pulled that off! Morocco part 1

IMy sister and I are traveling in Morocco for the winter break. We are using a tour company called G Adventures, which I hope will satisfy both her need for a tour company that handles everything and my need for a small group/more backpacker style. Before we left, April had found out a city called Chefchaouen  It is known for its blue buildings. I had read about it before as well but it was not part of tour and it was pretty far out of the way so just figured we would have to miss it. 

But....

We had a rather eventful start to our trip. My poor sister had a delayed flight and then we had problems getting her picked up at the airport. She ended up getting here 12 hours later than scheduled. Since we had a couple of days before the tour started and April really wanted to go to the Blue City I decided to do what I could to make it happen. According to Google, Chefchaouen was about 4.5 hours away. It would be a very long day but it was doable.

I couldn't find a tour that had room last minute. I asked the front desk and they said I could hire a taxi for about $335. I looked into renting a car-- it would be half as much.  See, the problem is I'm cheap. I understand that some things really are worth the extra money but I still have a really hard time spending money when I know I can get it cheaper. 

I knew April would rather just pay the money. I was really debating, but I never let that show. Hiring a taxi meant we could leave earlier, we wouldn't have to worry about driving there, we wouldn't have worry about parking or figuring out where to go. BUT it was twice as much. I pushed forward with the rental car. 

We should have just hired the taxi. 

Here's what my sister had to say about it on Facebook: 

"Day 2 in Morocco. Well, I guess I did empty out that bad luck basket; either that or my sister’s good juju is enough to surpass my bad juju. What we did today could have had 100 things go wrong…and I am sitting here utterly stunned that nothing did! Before I left I heard of this place in Morocco called the “Blue City”, thanks to my co-worker Lizabeth. After I saw pics of it I HAD to go there. Unfortunately it wasn’t part of our tour here and according to Google Maps it was 4 1/2hrs away. But we had 2 extra days in Casablanca before the tour so we looked into what it would take to get there. Unfortunately all the arranged tours were booked but the front desk told us we could hire a taxi for the day to take us there for $330. But my sister came up with the idea that renting a car and driving there ourselves would cost half that much. I wasn’t super excited about that idea but she said she felt confident she could get us there and she is known for her 6th sense super power of an internal GPS system in her mind. So I decided to go along with it. (Note…later in this adventure she said she wasn’t actually that confident.) We found a Budget rental car place on a nice big busy street but she didn’t like the price they quoted so she wanted to keep looking. We found another place down a back alley called “Go Car”. It was half the price of the other place and when I saw the car I knew why…there wasn’t a corner of the car that wasn’t busted up. But needing to get on the road for this long ride, we took it and left. Not long after that our rational senses started to come to us. First, not 2 mins after we left we noticed that both the gas light and the ‘check engine’ light were on! Ok…so now how do we get gas? Was it going to be easy? What if the car breaks down on the way there? Oh yeah, and let’s add that the car had no navigation. My sister had her phone but we didn’t bring the charger and it was running low. I’ll skip to the end and bypass the scary backroads we got semi-lost on, a couple of near accidents we got in, but needless to say we made it there….in 7 ½ hours. Right at dusk so we only had 30 mins to run around the town and shoot as many blue things as we could see before it got dark and we headed home. I truly can’t believe we made it there and back in one piece and the car did too! Now…let’s hope it stays put outside this hotel until we can take it back in the morning. So…was it worth it? I don’t know….you’ll have to tell me if you think it was when you see the pics we took. But I’ll tell you this…$330 would have been money well spent!"

That just scratches the surface. The run down: I rented a car, in a foreign country, where no one speaks English, with only GPS on a phone I didn't have a car charger for. It was crazy. We were trying to conserve the phone battery so we would turn it off and back on only when we thought we really needed it. That combined with the fact that the guy at the car rental place insisted it was better to go through Fes. That made our trip there take 7 1/2 hours. 

The phone took us to weird places- places without roads, places without out people, places that were really beautiful. We finally made it but it was getting dark. That's my biggest regret of the whole thing. I wish we could have gotten there an hour earlier so we could get better pictures. We would have if we had gone the way Google said, not the rental car guy. 

Chefchaouen was beautiful. We used a local tour guide that helped up find a charger for the phone and took us on a quick, 30 min tour of the city. We practically ran through the place and snapped as much as we could, but it was so dark it was hard. 

The trip back we decided to just follow the route the phone said and not go through Fes. It only took 5 hours. We had a scare at the start of the trip back when the first cigarette lighter didn't work. The phone was at 1% and not charging. Luckily we found a second one and got it to work. It was pretty smooth going home except windy scary roads, a random detour off road thanks to Siri, and SUPER thick, scary fog for the last 2 hours. I almost forgot to mention we passed about 25 police checkpoints throughout the trip. What is that about? Random and everywhere. We only had to actually stop at one though. 

We made it!! All we had to do was return the car in the morning, no problem, right? I wish. The rental place was just a few blocks away. I go to Sirii for directions and she decides to play a little prank on me. She tells me to turn right on a street. I do. It's the same street as the street car. She tells me to turn right again. I can't, there's not a street there. It's like a cult-a-sac and there's a sidewalk and cars between me and the road. I keep driving past a few more of these and I'm not sure what to do. Then there's one that's not blocked by cars and I think about taking it but I would still be going off a big curb so I don't. 

I keep driving and all the sudden we're on a plaza. Yes, a plaza, like where people walk, not drive cars. April and I start freaking out. People are staring at us in shock. April starts chanting, "I'm so embarrassed, I'm so embarrassed!" I yell, "What do I do?" All we can see are poles blocking the edges of the plaza. April says go back, go back! We head back up the non-road and decide jumping the curb was the only way to go so that's what we do. 

FINALLY, we made it back and got the car turned in. Everything worked out in the end. :) 

Here are some of the picture April got from our trip.