Our First Day in Essaouira

It all went so smoothly, thanks to Paula’s careful planning.

We woke up in the flat in Seville where we’ve been for the month of January. We spent the morning making final preparations, and by the end of the day we laid our heads to rest in a hotel in Marrakech, Morocco. The hardest part was the walk to the train station in Seville, hefting our backpacks, our laptops, and towing our stuffed “wheelie” suitcases, bouncing and rattling over the cobblestones

The bus ride to the Seville airport, standing room only, was only slightly easier. . (“Next time it’s a taxi!” we both mouthed to each other.) But once we’d dropped the bags off at the airline (accepted even though we were 1 kg over the 20 kg limit), things got much better. Riding in a crowded, cramped airplane is never my favorite thing, but requires no effort on our part. Soon enough we were on the ground – it’s not very far, the south of Spain to Marrakech –meeting up with our driver (Paula had arranged for that in advance, too), and speeding through the modern streets of Marrakech to our hotel.

Exit from the new super-modern Marrakesh airport

The hotel was upscale in the newer part of town, but still only $40 USD for the night, selected for its proximity to the bus station. Once settled, we walked the 15 minutes to the station and got our tickets for the next day.

Entry to the train station. Pretty cool!

Next day? Why are we leaving Marrakesh so soon? Because we’ve been here before, and know what it’s like. Vibrant, busy, crowded, modern and exotic, old and run down. Lots to see and do, but not our favorite place in Morocco, and certainly not for a whole month. So the next morning, after breakfast at the café we’d spotted the night before, we were once more walking down the street towing our wheelies, and loaded with our backpacks and laptops. (No cobbles this time, though!)

The new super-modern Marrakesh train station. The much less interesting bus station is behind it

Since we’d been here and taken this same bus ride a few years ago it was old hat. Sit patiently in the bus station, watching people come and go. Finally we load our bags aboard the bus and climb up with dozens of others to find our reserved seats in this large, modern, comfortable, air-conditioned bus. Then through the suburbs – which seem much larger now than they did three years ago – and out to the highway. We watch the fields pass by, mostly flat and often dry. Hundreds of acres of olive trees, and orange trees; old men and young boys with herds of goats. Plain low houses made of drab mud bricks. And always, sooner or later, a minaret, the distinctive square tower of the local mosque from which the call to prayer is issued five times a day.

Market Day! A city we passed through on the bus

View from the bus window, near Essaouira

Our first view of Essaouira and the Atlantic Ocean

About two in the afternoon we reach the coastal hills, and have a brief view of the city of Essaouira stretching along the ocean. Soon after we pull into the unpaved turnaround of the bus station, already crowded by the porters and touts offering their services to carry bags or guide the newly-arrived to their accommodations. Paula has made arrangements to meet with Bouchra, the caretaker for our apartment. By the time we connect with her the bus has left, the crowd has thinned, and we make the quick walk to a modern apartment building just down the street from the medina, the old town within the ancient city walls.

Inside the fourth-floor apartment we were greeted by the woman’s adult daughter, who speaks perfect English, offering us anise-flavored cookies (biscuits, to our English friends!) and glasses of the traditional Moroccan mint tea, hot, sweet, and refreshing. After introductions, and a run-down on use of the apartment, how the keys work, don’t put laundry on the terrace use the roof instead, etc. we are left alone to contemplate the view of the city and the ocean.

First order of business was the Internet. Apparently we buy it by the day here; still not sure how that works. As instructed, we found a tobacco shop and gave the owner the phone number and 100 dirham ($10USD). After a few minutes of doing something behind the counter he said we were good for 30 days. (Whatever that means!) But yes, the apartment does have Internet now!

Second task was to find a bottle of wine, a delicate issue in a Muslim country… not really. There’s a shop just outside the old town walls, and while it looks edgy in a run-down, skirting-the-law sort of way, so do the machinist shop and the carpenter shop and the hair dressers that surround it. (We’re spoiled in California, one of the richest states in one of the richest countries; everything else can look tawdry and run down. Realizations of the traveler…)

Now we were prepared to sit on the terrace, glass of wine in hand, and watch the sun settle into the ocean, past the palm trees and next to the nearby rocky islands. Yes, this will work just fine for the rest of the month!

The next day our goal was a major food shopping expedition. While the medina (the old town in most Moroccan cities, typically inside the original walls) is full of vendors, we’re not yet sure where to get what we need. To shorten the shopping part, and make sure we’ve got the basics, we headed for the Carrefour (means road intersection in French), a large French supermarket chain, out on the edge of town. It is about a mile and a half away (3 km or so); walkable one way, but tough on the return when laden with groceries. But, taxis are cheap here, we’re told. So we headed out, backpacks empty except for some extra shopping bags (including our special Trader Joe’s bag).

The streets through this newer part of town were fairly clean and wide, lined with 3- or 4-story apartment buildings. (Floor numbering, and hence number of stories, is a bit of an issue: in Europe the ground floor is called, well, the ground floor, or floor 0, with the first floor above that called, well, the first floor. In the US, of course, the ground floor is number 1, and the second floor is the first one above that. So we push button 3 on the elevator to get to our apartment here in Essaouira, which makes it the fourth floor. Right?)

Along one side of the street is a rusty old fence, with vegetation beyond. Our map shows some kind of park. We follow the fence along, trying to see in; we do catch a glimpse of a lake of some kind. Then we come upon two camels.

Camels going on about their business (whatever THAT might be)

This is about as surprising as seeing horses in downtown San Luis Obispo. Sure, there’s lots of horses in California, probably more now than before those horseless carriage things came along. But they’re not very practical for day-to-day use. I know there are many camels in Morocco; they are still used for transport in the desert. Desert camel rides are certainly a staple of the tourist industry. But here we are at least a three-day camel ride from the desert!

It seems this fellow was on his way somewhere, and had stopped in the shade to rest, or adjust something. Uncertain of camel protocol, we were hesitant to approach. Would he offer us a ride? Let us take his picture for a fee? As we continued along the road, following the edge of the park, he finished his preparations and mounted the lead camel, then rode off ahead of us. Later we came to an intersection and saw him in the distance, riding the one camel and leading the other, with us none the wiser.

Meanwhile, we were discussing getting a roast chicken. In Montpellier during the first three months of our trip we found any number of chicken rotisserie places, and tired several before settling on our favorite. In Seville, the one chicken roaster we found wasn’t very good, but we had an oven in our apartment for our last month there, and turned out some very good oven-roasted chickens. Our apartment here has an oven, leading us to wonder if the raw chickens here would roast up as well as those from Andalusia.

Right about then I saw a shop down a side street with a drawing of a chicken on the sign. There were crates of produce around the doorway, but we were interested in chicken. I stepped into the darkened shop and found a powerful and not pleasant odor. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I noticed cages near the ceiling, with live chickens in them. Not exactly what we were looking for! The proprietor, busy pulling things out of a chicken carcass (don’t ask!), did not seem to speak a language we knew. Another customer, though, helped us understand, in French, that no, no roasted chickens were available here, but we could try down the street and around the corner somewhere. We thanked him and continued on our way.

A local market in suburban Essaouira selling produce and chickens. Live chickens...

We arrived at the Carrefour, a large, low, plain-looking building surrounded by a nearly-empty parking lot (not a lot of people here have cars; on the other hand, we saw no place to tie up camels, either…). Inside it was like most supermarkets, with large wide well-lit aisles separating high shelves loaded with brightly-colored stuff. We quickly found the liquor room, a separate part of the store with a good wine selection and all the usual hard liquors. We were told we were not allowed to take our purchases into the other part of the store; most likely, I figure, to avoid putting off the more devout Muslims whose religion forbids the consumption of alcohol. So while we won’t find a liquor store on every other corner here in Morocco, alcohol is hardly a banned substance.

We wandered through these familiar aisles we’d never seen before (are supermarkets an archetype?) selecting the products we needed. I found raw chickens, carefully cleaned and safely protected behind tight plastic wrapping. Great! We’ll roast this in our oven and see how it compares to the ones in Seville. (Spoiler alert: We liked the chickens from Mercodonia – a supermarket chain in Seville –better.)

Finally, our packs bulging with bottles of wine and packaged goods, we needed to find a taxi. But it didn’t take long, waiting forlornly in the near-deserted parking lot, before someone arrived in a taxi, and we were on our way home. We had a bit of a problem explaining to the driver where the apartment building was; I inadvertently stumbled on a good solution: I held up my cell phone so the driver could see the mapping program showing the route. He appreciated that, and we were soon at our door. The cost for this 10-minute ride? Less than a dollar! (Camels can’t compete with that, I imagine.)

After four days or so we are getting settled in, exploring the medina and the newer parts of town to the north and south, finding shady cafes and stores selling everyday food supplies. In the next blog we’ll talk about what we’re finding, here in this ancient coastal city.