Kathleen
5/24/2013 – Essaouira
Beautiful seaside village! Essaouira is one of the premier resort cities in Morocco, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. The madina is small, but filled with high-quality goods for sale as well as the regular local markets and the wharf area contains about 20 stalls where you can pick out fresh fish and they will clean it and grill it up for you with some french fries and salad on the side – absolutely delicious! Last, but certainly not least, the beaches on both sides of the town have light brown, fine sand that stretches on as far as the eye can see. It was a bit cool for beach weather, probably in the high seventies and low eighties when we were there, so the beach was fairly empty and we had a lovely walk for a couple of hours one morning getting our feet wet and just following the sand until we got tired and hungry.
Wandering about town, the strangest thing happened, we ran into some folks that we knew…well, a couple of very friendly, gung-ho Moroccan travelers from Montreal, Don and Real. We had luckily had dinner right next to them in lovely Chefchouen, and we caught up a bit on our travels. They had the most extraordinary experience on the way in to Essaouira of seeing goats in trees. Yes, it is true, the goats here actually climb trees for tasty vittles from time to time, and although I think that the shepherds might help them out a bit on the main tourist tracks, this is a real thing. Real shared his pictures of the goats (which we hadn’t yet seen, but did, in fact, glance on the road back to Marrakesh, but didn’t get any pictures nearly as good as the one posted here). It was so nice to meet these friendly, adventurous, North American travelers twice in Marocco.
In Essaouira, we again had the luck to stay in a riad with a French proprieter at
Riad Perle de L’eau. The riad was situated right on the Atlantic and we enjoyed sitting and having a beer in the evening looking out over the beautiful beach and rocks view. The owner, Ernest couldn’t have been more accomodating and we made the wise choice of having dinner with him and two other French guests, Phillipe and Anne Marie, who own their own guest house in the south of France, on the second night we were there. Our theory about French hotel owners and the food they serve proved true and the five of us had a fantastic meal, great conversation (we were lucky because both Ernest and Anne-Marie spoke very good English) and some lovely Moroccon wine (I was introduced to gris – gray – wine, a cross between a rose and a white, and it was quite delicious).
We were sorry to leave Essaouira after two nights and head for our final Moroccan destination, Marrekesh.
