TRAVEL STORIES
Finding the Falls of Akchour / Rif Mountains
A blissful mountain road trip in Northern Morocco
We left for the mountains in the morning, leaving the apartment keys with the downstairs neighbor, who would let the plumber in when he arrived. We packed up everything, preparing to abandon our host’s leaky apartment for an Airbnb in the old medina in Chefchaouen. But first, we were to visit the waterfalls of Akchour.
We drove with the windows down into the Rif mountains — grey and brown walls of earth cloaked in morose clouds, verdant valleys strewn with farms. Piloting the school’s van, we were free to stop and get out of the car wherever we pleased, to bathe in the atmosphere, to reside for small moments somewhere between the intertwining boundaries of water, mountain, sky, and cloud.
Driving that day, I felt a strong validation of my presence and purpose there: That freedom inherent in boundless possibility, the detachment from material possessions and commitments, the ability — that only grows with time — to reflect and look with clarity upon your life from a great distance. I was experiencing a valley and day and moment that I could never have witnessed had I not impulse booked the flight to Morocco in January, or had I given in to anticipatory anxiety and guilt of travel during an epidemic.
It was almost one year to the day that Iowa had completely closed down: the doors of all bars and restaurants shuttered, prompting my first time filing for unemployment. Looking back at that time — all of the uncertainty, confusion, doubt, fear for the future. If only I had known that one year later I would be experiencing a moment like this one, I could have let go so much easier of the anxiety I had felt at that time. You only see in hindsight how pointless and crippling fear and anxiety can be.
Halfway into the drive, I pulled the car over at a scenic point so we could get out of the car and take in the view. It was becoming dangerous for me to continue driving, since my eyes wanted to focus on anything but the road ahead. The girls certainly didn’t object to my request. Delphine decided to walk further down the road to explore, without giving us a timing estimate, as she had done the day before at the Spanish Mosque outside Chefchaouen; just mentioning that she was taking a walk, and then disappearing with a determined trot into the distance.
I took some photos of Sarah and Jiaqi, and Jiaqi offered to take some of me, which I rarely agree to while traveling. We were shooting on some sort of aborted construction project off the side of the highway, with a wall extending over a sheer drop into the valley. And for some reason, I felt compelled to step all along it until the end, looking down into the chasm, exposed to open air in all directions, feeling a stillness and smallness while contemplating the grand surroundings.
As we were still waiting for Delphine to return, I thought it would be appropriate to drive off down the road in her direction, and deliberately pass her while pretending not to notice. Jiaqi and Sarah sanctioned the idea, and so we drove past her on her walk back, with Jiaqi recording Delphine’s frantic reaction. I stopped the car after turning past a bend in the road, where we would be concealed from her view as we waited for her to catch up huffing and puffing. She took the prank with breathless smiles of relief and good humor. Shortly after arriving at the entrance to Akchour, we heard back from Mr. Harim; who told us that the plumber had found a serious leak at the apartment. He said that he hoped we could find someplace cheap to stay for the next two nights. We were already a step ahead of him.
While I found Chefchaouen to be overrated, I cannot say the same for Akchour. The massive waterfall there is about a two to three-hour hike into the mountains alongside a fledgling river, complemented by beautiful streaming waterfalls under a green forest canopy. While hiking alongside the stream, one passes dozens of picturesque open-air cafes, each set in groves of flowering trees adjacent to delicate cascades of the stream that passes the trail.
The smell of tajine rises with smoke from the fires over which the cafe owners cook, imploring you to stop almost at each one you encounter. The mountains here are colored orange-brown, with a blanket of trees skirting the shoulders. Sometimes the cliff faces expose the seams of rock layers that make them up, folded on top of each other hundreds of times over the untold count of ages it took them to form. While walking here, it took me back to Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit: only minus the rhododendrons and dal bhat, and instead of villages along the trail, it was these little cafes.
Delphine had wandered off again, this time without warning us, and so the three of us decided to take the main trail towards the falls, assuming we’d find her along the way. After about half an hour without any sign of her, we just continued on, as our general plan had been to see the falls, and we shouldn’t be expected to wait on her every whim to wander. It became this joke as the hours passed; that our prank on her earlier was just a trial run of our scheme to permanently ditch her, which we had now seemed to have achieved.
Jiaqi, Sarah, and I reached the falls after a couple of hours of walking the forest paths and stepping over the hand-cut stones that zig-zagged from bank to bank. We would leapfrog with Moroccan families making the trek with young children or even the elderly. We’d stop every now and then to just listen to the sound of the water, and take in the many sounds and colors around us. The sunlight penetrated the forest canopy at many different angles, and when reflected back up by the water cast dancing lights on the bottoms of the leaves above.
I felt more at peace at this moment than I had at any point during the past month, as most of my time in Morocco had been spent in the bustling and stifling commercial cacophony that is Casablanca. Here at Akchour, enveloped in an atmosphere of rejuvenation, I shed layers as I worked up a sweat, and renewed myself while breathing the mountain air
When we arrived at the falls around mid-afternoon, we still had not found Delphine. We rested in silence at a table on a cliff directly across from the waterfall overlooking the pristine pool below. Our stomachs were roaring after the hike, and so we ordered chicken tajine and mint tea from one of the waterside cafes while relaxing by the water. Delphine found us just before tajine was served, arriving flustered and out of breath. I had started to worry for her for a while by then, so it was good to have our group reunited again just in time for a much-needed meal.
Our mouths burned as we ate — the smell and the sizzling sound of the steaming tajine in front of us was too strong for us to resist waiting for it to cool. We devoured the meal — eating as Moroccans do, tearing morsels of bread from the loaf to form an edible spoon with which you scooped up your portions. We reflected upon the absurdity of our living situation of the past two nights, and how all that frustration paled in comparison to the emotions present here at the falls of Akchour: white, foamy water streaming down mossy green walls into an azure pool.
The girls slept as I drove us back through the mountains to Chefchaouen, where we headed straight to our new accommodation: a beautiful dar (Moroccan home) situated within the fortified wall just above the old medina. The home was difficult to find, nestled in the labyrinth of attached blocks of houses where you can’t tell where one ends and another begins. It’s a small enough city that all we had to do was ask directions to a shopkeeper close to where we were looking and he called the owner to come let us in.
After almost three days of travel, we finally had a place where we could relax and unwind. We found dinner at sunset in the square below, and after climbing back up the steep steps through the city, fell asleep to the sounds of foot traffic in the alleyways outside the thin walls: conversations in the local dialect of passersby, and children playing in the nearby houses that were all densely packed together.
The third day, our last full one in the city, we would each spend in solitude in our own way: Jiaqi preparing for a group presentation, Sarah in quiet meditation on the sunny rooftop, Delphine out walking the mountain trails, and me walking the streets with a novel and a notebook, sitting down at colorful cafes I hadn’t visited yet, enjoying the glasses of mint tea characteristic of the North, as I washed down delicious Moroccan pastries while observing the tourists and locals as they moved about the main square.
I realized I had had my fill of Chefchaouen. It was beautiful and charming, but I felt restless, and too comfortable. The following day, we would start our five-hour drive in the morning, and I was ready for it. I was excited to get back to Casablanca, where I had a more tangible purpose: obligations at the school, looming preparation for classes I would be teaching the following weeks, and other personal things to see to/people to catch up with. Chefcahouen to me had been the perfect Moroccan tourist trap, but Akchour had meant much more — it was a small journey, that cost time and effort, and led to a palpable sense of reward. And the feeling that took me back to Nepal awoke in me the desire to return to that country soon, as I had just learned of its recent reopening. It would have to wait though, as I still had three more months in Morocco.
