Feb 2008; Chefchaouen.

Hi again Finn, I hope that all’s well with you, certainly you seem to be having a great time here so far. As ever everyone loves you now, just as I hope they will whenever you are reading this.

Sometimes it’s difficult knowing what you want to do!

Well son, as you may or may not have guessed, we have a problem with what we are doing here in Morocco and that is that neither of us...though especially me, are quite sure that we are doing what we want to do. Now don’t get me wrong, we like it out here, but the original idea was to develop a “responsible tourism” project, and for a variety of reasons, mostly based on the idea that Fez and Morocco is a good investment (this whole thing is basically our pension, so if it all goes wrong, you’ll have to be subbing me for a pint!) we opted to buy in Fez.

Now as I’ve said previously I’ve loved Morocco for years, and even prior to thinking of buying in Fez had probably visited Morocco more than 20 times, travelling all over from Tangiers to Dakhla. The only thing for me being that in all that time, Fez was probably my least favourite place in it, which is not to say that I didn’t like Fez, rather that I prefered many other places to Fez.

However when we started to look at investing here, Fez was an obvious option because it is such a potential centre for tourism. I’d tried looking at Marrakesh and Essouirra, but both were too expensive and even by the time we got here, prices had risen dramatically. However we didn’t want to stay in UK, we couldn’t return to working in emergencies/INGOs with you being so young and out of all of the places that we’d visited, Morocco was the only place that your mum and I agreed that we both wanted to move to.

But, even when we’d bought the place in Fez, we were far from sure that it was where we wanted to be and I certainly didn’t and don’t want to run a “guest house”, rather the idea was to develop an “eco/responsible tourism project”. Now this idea links very much to what I’d been doing with INGOs and what I wanted to be able to do was to make tourism act as a means for social development and to show that this could be done whilst at the same time linking to external entrepreneurial investment.

Daddy are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Thus we are looking at developing Dar Tazi..or Slaoui..or Finley..in as environmentally responsible a way as possible. This means investing in solar energy for electricity and water heating, using traditional materials and building methods, minimising water useage and waste, and buying and employing locally, as a bare minimum.

However it also means that we should have as positive a social impact as possible, for example in poverty alleviation and the promotion of local culture and traditions.Thus the project should act as a dynamo for funding social development projects and our employment should provide targetted, as far as possible, to promote the greatest social benefit. This means that when we employ someone, as well as their abilities, we are looking at who and how many people will benefit most from the employment.

Equally we want to ensure that the project promotes the respect, development and mutual understanding of local culture and traditions by tourists and local people. This might sound idealistic, and certainly it is more difficult than say, just setting up a hotel and letting it run, but to be honest, apart from a political and moral responsibility to ensure that what we do, benefits not only us, but the community in which we are working, if I am honest I think that if I was only running a hotel, I’d probably drink myself to death with boredom!

Nonetheless, despite the high ideals, neither of us were sure that we wanted to do this in Fez and so we put the project on hold and wandered off to look at possibly doing this in the country side....thus we returned to Chefchaouen!

Chefchaouen was the first place that I visited when I initially came to Morocco back in 1984. I’d hitched down from UK and met a German guy in a seedy hotel in Alcatheras (are there any other types of hotel in Alcatheras?) who’d asked me where I was going. I didn’t really have an idea at all. Rather I was more interested in the romance of adventure in exotic north Africa...and smoking loads of spliff, so I mumbled somehting about starting in Tangiers and seeing from there.

I remember him looking at me, long haired and besuited in a mix of hippy Indian and Leeds punk/goth clothes and telling me that I’d be eaten for breakfast in Tangiers and that I’d do better to go to a small village called Chefchaouen, which was in the mountains of northern Morocco. There I could safely smoke to my hearts content, and get used to Morocco, whilst equally keeping a hand on my bags and money, that may well have been lured from me in Tangiers!

I followed his advice and spent a couple of glorious weeks in Chaouen before wandering down to Fez, Larache and back up to stay with a guy I met on a Kif Farm in the Rif. It was great advice and I have thanked that guy several times since. Thus began my relationship both with Morocco but also with Chefchaouen.

Chaouen has it’s roots as a base for religious pilgrimage, and of resistance to Christian incursion in to Islamic north Africa. This anti European/Christian bent was further intensfied by influxes of Jewish and Muslim refugees fleeing pursecution in Spain. Prior to the Spanish conquest oof the north in the 1920s, only three Europeans had visited the area, and all of those had either been killed or threatened with death.

These days Chaouen is bigger, touristy and booming. As with everywhere in Morocco, there is a thriving building trade, with new appartment blocks and houses seemingly everywhere. It has also developed in to a tourist centre of it’s own. However it’s laid back and safe. Nestled in the mountains where Europes hashish is produced, it retains a happy hippy aire and the maze of blue washed houses give it an almost Disneyesque feel. I still love it and so we thought we’d have a look at buying a small place there.

Now houses in the medina are generally small..very small and to be honest the idea of a cramped little house, surrounded by burgeoning tourism again didn’t do it for us. However all around is beautiful and relatively unexplored countryside that offered far more of what we wanted and what we wanted to offer but buying land in Chaouen is even more difficult than buying a house in Fez.

Firstly, as I’ve said, Chaouen and the Rif are well kown as centres of production for kif and hashish, which you may or may not know of by now. Kif production is the major industry in the area, with over 800 square kms of land in the area dedicated to it’s production, which contributes an estimated £1.4 billion to the Moroccan economy.

To get an idea of what we’re talking about have a look at these:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7pt0Eo5nF8Y

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kSb3cys5eIM&NR=1

This makes buying land in this region equal to buying someone’s business. So there were times when we’d look at a piece of land or an area and be told that a hectare of land there would cost 100,000s of euros!!! This being because if anyone sold you their land, you would also be potentialy buying several years of hashish production from them....not that we had any intention of going in to that type of business!

However, the government has made some efforts to limit kif production to Ketama and around. Thus fields that previously had been filled with kif production closer to Chaouen, cannot now, legally produce it.

Farmers have tried to grow other crops, but in terms of financial gain, there isn’t any comparison. With a growing increase in interest by foreigners in buying property in the region, there came other possibilities for this now less than productive land..it’s sale!

Then of course Finn, there is the added complication of trying to buy land and being a European, which means that people think that you have loads of money and thus inflate their prices...So we’d go and see a plot, which might be interesting and be told again that it would cost several hundred thousand euros...but for cow grazing land.....and the reason for the price? Yes because we’re from Europe and thus should be able to pay. One time we saw a great little plot. It was owned by six brothers. We asked the price and were told it would cost 600,000 euros! But how is that we asked incredulous? Well obviously because we are 6 brothers and we each want 100,000 E from the sale!

Dream on kif boy!

That’s also what it’s like in Fez. You’d see a house and initialy ask the price, which would generaly come in as multiples of 15,000 euros....we soon learnt that the price of a basic appartment in the new town was 15,0000 euros and thus if the house had 3 owners it would cost at least 45,000! Given that many houses had more than 10 owners, you soon learnt to ask first how many owners there were and begin to make calculations from there!

But I digress...again!

We spent weeks, nay months wandering around fields in Chaouen and the lower Rif. We’d been working with a small estate agents who showed us a plot. It was the only one we could find that was actually for sale and it was lovely, having hundreds of trees and being relatively near to Chaouen...but again...not quite what we were looking for. Too close to a main road, and too much of a hill. It was also terribly expensive. However after months of looking we’d not been able to find what we were looking for and were close to just giving in and buying a place that “would do” rather than a place that we really loved....does that sound familiar? We’d even come up to Chaouen with the money for the purchase in a ruck sack..that’s how it’s done there..but just prior to going to the lawyers to sign decided we’d go back and have another look, just to make sure.

That’s where we met Mustapha and his family.

Quite by chance we bumped in to a guy who was showing a few French guys around a plot of land. We talked and explained what we were trying to do and he said we should give him a chance to help us!

The great thing about Mustapha was that he’d lived in England for several years, spoke English and was very relaxed with European culture. For sure it was business..everything is, but at least we understood each other...and his wife and kids loved you, so you spent loads of time being lavished with kisses from them.

Anyway, we again spent weeks looking around Chaouen and eventually found a plot just outside in a place called Lubar. It was owned by a guy called Futtle, which sounds like Fuddle, which in Arabic means welcome and that was already a good start.

These are images of our land.

The first time I visited the place I knew it was special and had an afternoon there on my own. It was beautiful. There’s a well, spring and water fall, fig, olive, apple, vine and pear orchards, a seven hundred year old mosque, 360 degree mountains and it’s all south facing.

The neighbours speak Berber and I can magine you loving playing around in all the space that there is up there.

It also has an old ruin of a house on it and we’ll be staring by building this in to a home for us and an eco lodge for tourists, linking to trips in to the Rif mountains and maybe even the Mediteranian coast which is close by or even Larache, both of which we’ve been looking at...... perhaps that says something about our...my committment to Fez! Well actually it also says alot about the fact that we are trying to develop a triange /tour of city, mountains and sea options for tourists coming to the north of Morocco.

Pics of places we looked at in Larache and on the Med.

Of course there is a slight fly in the ointment...we return to getting what you can, not necessarilly what you want....It so happens that the king is building a palace in the area, well about 2 – 3 kms away as the crow flies and as such when we asked about building permission, we were told that only the governor could give it, but that noone, that’s to say, the local population ever asked for permission and perhaps we were being “too European” about this permission.

True enough, when I asked several neighbours who had clearly built or were building new houses, they all looked at me rather strangly when I mentioned permission, and so we’ve decided to just see what happens, at the very least we’ll have a wonderful place for us, and maybe it’ll just be “friends” who can visit...and we can all be very friendly!

If Finn, you are reading this now you’ll know how successfull we’ve been...I’ll be interested to hear what you think!