Hi, I'm Harris Lapiroff.

In my travels in Morocco for the past week, I’ve mostly stuck to destinations that I can reach by train and the occasional short petit taxi (more on this name later) trip to get to a Medina or Riad. I’m not a driver (yet) and even if I were, I think I’d be fairly uncomfortable driving in Morocco. From landing in Casablanca, I travelled to Rabat and Fès – all three cities available on Morocco’s train system. In general I’ve found Morocco’s train system to be excellent, easy to use, affordable and on time, with even some modern rapid train lines recently added.

But for my last city visit in Morocco I wanted to go to Chefchaouen, the famously blue-painted city in the Rif Mountains. Chefchaouen is not on the train system. I opted to take a train from Casablanca up to Tangier – Morocco’s northern port city, just across the Strait of Gibralatar from Spain – and then a grand taxi southeast to Chefchaouen.

For any frantic web searchers who, like me earlier this week, find themselves anxiously pacing Gare de Tanger-Ville trying to figure out how to get Chefchaouen, here’s the short version of how I took a Grand Taxi from Tangier to Chefchaouen:

1. I flagged down a blue petit taxi at the train station and rode it the bus station where I could pick up a grand taxi. I wasn’t sure how to find this bus station, but I asked the taxi driver to take me to the “bus station for grand taxis” and he knew where to go. Looking back over my trip, Google Maps lists this location as “Parc Autasa”. He asked me for 30 dirham for the ride (a little over $3 at the exchange rates I’ve been getting – the ~10dh = 1USD conversion makes things very easy). I only had a 50dh note, so I let him keep it as a tip.¹

2. At the lot where he dropped me, there appeared to be a man in the middle of the lot coordinating taxis. I walked up to him and said, “Chaouen?”² He took me to an empty van where he spoke to the driver and gestured me get in.

3. I waited for 5 more passengers to arrive, also going to Chefchaoeun. It took 20 or 30m. Not insubstantial, but less than I feared. Before we left, the guy in charge asked us each for 70 dirham (~$7).

4. I rode the 2 hours to Chefchaouen with a stop at a gas station in the middle to use the toilet. For an extra 30 dirham (~$3) the driver took me right up to the medina where I was staying.

The more detailed version is this:

Morocco has two types of taxi: petit taxi, your standard private for-hire point-to-point taxi for service within a city, much like we have in the U.S., and grand taxi, a minivan that typically carries six passengers who are not necessarily of any relation to each other to a shared destination at a much reduced cost. Grand taxis can leave city areas and even go some long distances.

I had read a fair bit about the grand taxi system but the descriptions of it in my guidebook, travel blogs, and travel forums didn’t provide me with quite enough guidance to know exactly how to go about taking one. To add to the challenge, I’d been relying on English and the little bit of French I had from high school to get by in the other cities—but I discovered that in the far north of Morocco people spoke mostly Spanish. Unfortunately for myself (and everyone I interacted with) my Arabic is non-existent and my Spanish is worse than my already pretty bad French.

Fortunately I left myself all day to figure travel out and it didn’t take me more than 40 minutes or so to get on the right track. The first thing I had tried, I think somewhat reasonably, was the grand taxi lot visible in front of Gare de Tanger-Ville (the train station) where the dispatcher in a flourescent vest gestured me to get in a taxi and quoted me 700dh (~$70), 10x the amount I expected to pay. “Oh, not a shared taxi?” I said. “No shared taxi. You take that taxi to bus station,” he replied, gesturing to a blue petit taxi.

I basically understood from this that I had to take a petit taxi to a bus station where I could pick up a… bus? Grand taxi? But I felt uncertain and anxious so I went back into the train station to breathe and search the internet for advice. I found a number of forum posts and travel blogs that described taking grand taxis to Chefchaouen, some even describing taking a petit taxi to a bus station, though with inconsistent information about where. I couldn’t fully piece it together, so I decided to, successfully, throw myself at the mercy of a petit taxi driver to take me to the right place.

All in all the trip from Gare de Tanger-Ville to Chefchaouen Medina took me ~2h40 (counting the time I spent figuring out how to do it and anxiously searching the internet for advice) and cost me $15 including tips. I was glad to have the experience taking another local form of transit, grateful for the easy assistance of locals and, if I’m honest, a little proud of myself for figuring out how to do it!

I was also somewhat glad to be traveling this part of my trip solo. The previous legs of my travel I was with Emma and was fairly dilligent about ensuring our travels were planned completely end-to-end. Figuring it out on the fly worked well for me here, but I think would have been even more stressful if I had been worrying about the comfort and stress of another person.

I am less certain of my ability to get a grand taxi back from Chaouen to Tangier and am on a tighter timeline (flight to catch) so I’ve booked a bus for tomorrow back to Tangier. It’s slightly cheaper at 65dh rather than 70dh, but about an hour longer journey involving a transfer in Tetouan.

1. Taxis in Morocco famously overcharge tourists. I have no idea if this was an overcharge, but ~$3 seemed like a very good price to me, so I didn’t put any effort into figuring it out. ↩︎

2. The city was originally called Chaouen from the Arabic for “peaks” and was later named Chefchaouen, roughly, “look at the peaks” – but locals refer to it by either name. ↩︎