Around The World – Essaouira, Morocco
My goal on this leg of the trip is to make my last new stop, in the seaside town of Essaouira.
Up with the alarm at 7AM to get ready and pack. Said my goodbyes to my hosts, the mother insisted I have a glass of fresh squeezed OJ and 2 no 3 oranges for the train. Very sweet. I took the tram to the train station and bought my ticket to Marrakech. From there I have to take a bus, also run by the train system but called Supr@tours, from Marrakech to Essaouira.
The train was OK but actually over-air-conditioned. When I got to my cabin of 6 seats there were already 5 people in it and 3 of us newcomers trying to get in. Clearly two people were in the wrong place, but nobody was budging. I asked everyone to check their tickets, with a big smile on my face. One guy who spoke English well tried to out-sarcasm me and he went down in flames. Another guy got up and left and a lady took her child out of a seat and put her on her lap. OK, everything set now.
The morning sun was coming strongly in the window and I tried to pull the shade down but it kept rolling back up on its spring. I finally jammed a piece of paper in the tracks which held it in place. I watched The Hateful 8, which like all Tarantino movies was heavy on endless dialog with brief patches of bloody violence. Then I watched The Man In The High Tower until my battery went dead, but we were almost to Marrakech.
Why is it that all song lyrics about Morocco are incorrect? You can’t “rock the kasbah”, and there is no such thing as the “Marrakech Express.” We stopped at every bump in the desert on the way down and ticked along at about 45mph. Oh wait, maybe they were talking about drugs. Yeah, that’s it, drugs. Oh well.
We arrived in Marrakesh and I made it to the Supr@tours office next door in time for the 2:30 bus, but it was already full so I got a ticket to the 5:00 bus. I sat in the waiting room on a broken bench that tried to slide me off onto the floor and charged the laptop back up. My laptop now has 7 vertical lines that won’t go away no matter how much I tap or bend or squeeze. Will have to get it looked at when I get back home.
The bus was modern and comfortable and 3.5 hours, with a pee break at a side-of-the-road restaurant halfway along, where I’m sure the owner is paying handsomely to get the buses to stop there.
We arrive in Essaouira at about 8PM and I’m assaulted by taxi drivers. I show the address to one guy, he grabs my suitcase and puts it into a large wheelbarrow-like device and we walk for about 10 minutes through the narrow streets of the medina to my Airbnb, impossible to get to by taxi. I love this place, it’s flat! We arrive at the address down a side alley from the main medina walkway to discover it’s actually an 8-room hotel, quite nicely decorated with stone and tile and a fountain in the middle of the ground floor. My room is up one easy flight of stairs with a private bathroom and shower, both of which function in an excellent manner. The Wifi is having a hard time getting through all of the stone and concrete so I pull out my Wifi booster device, find a hidden plug halfway to my room, configure it and bam, strong Wifi up to the room. Worth every eurocent I paid for it!
The first thing I get when my email works again is a notice from my Italian Airbnb host that she’s cancelled my Instant Booking. Ugh. We message back and forth a bit and she says her hot water boiler has gone out and she doesn’t think she can get it fixed in the 9 days before I arrive and of course she didn’t block the days off on her calendar. That says something about Italian plumbers I think… I book another, luckily Airbnb is holding my payment to her so I don’t have to go through the pain of getting Citibank to allow another transaction through. I message my new host to see if she will accept a new Citibank card by FedEx, I hope it will arrive by the time I get there…
I unpack and go for a walk through the evening medina, most shops still open and quite chilly since we’re right on the Atlantic ocean. Walking along the inside of the giant walls I can hear the ocean crashing on the other side, anticipating the sights in the morning. I buy some DC and a tube of cookies and head back to the room.
My goals for my first day in Essaouira are to find an ATM and book a hammam. What is a hammam you may ask? Well it’s not a delicious combination of hummus and papadam, it’s an ancient local cleansing custom that they have now made fancy for the tourists with a combination of steam room, skin scrub with black soap, rinsing then massage. There are lots of variations on the theme and I didn’t know about it until last night when I saw signs for spas and massages here. I didn’t think massage was a big thing in Morocco but I checked some web sites and discovered this hammam thing. I read some reviews and selected a spa that’s around the corner from me here in the medina, and off I went.
I found the ATM and loaded up on what I hope really this time will be my last Dirhams. I found the best-reviewed spa halfway up a tunnel and booked in for tomorrow at 6:30 PM for $35. It’s New Year’s Eve today and the town is loaded with tourists in for a quick holiday, I’ve heard more English here than when I was in actual England. Plus a load of French people of course and some Spanish and German.
Achieving all my daily goals in the first 30 minutes is quite a feat, so the rest of the day was gravy. I discovered that about half of the streets in the medina are actually tunnels under buildings, a great idea for best use of space and also helps keep cool in the hot summer months.
I walked out of the medina towards the bright and sunny fort and port area. The fort is quite beautiful and was built in 14-something to protect somebody’s little empire, same story as everywhere I’ve been. The cannons are still in place, marked Seville 1794, so they were either bought or stolen and eventually found a home here. I was counselled that this small city is quite beautiful and it definitely is picturesque.
From the fort I walked through the bustling fishing port and fishmonger’s tables. This is the biggest fishing fleet I’ve seen on the whole trip I think, with dozens of really quite huge fishing boats and hundreds of fishmongers selling their catch on tables, laid out for individual purchase. I saw fish of all shapes and sizes and some frisbee-sized crabs.
I then walked through most of the small alleys and tunnels in the medina and stumbled upon a couple of workshops where craftsmen were creating things out of wood. This town is known for its woodworking with Thuya wood, which is in the cypress family with a dark red color and full of burls that make for incredibly beautiful objects. I’ve seen everything from turned bowls, boxes with marquetry of contrasting wood / tile / metal / mother of pearl inlay, backgammon sets, carved figures and tables all the way up to headboards for beds. There are a couple of artisan co-operatives where they pool their products for sale near the workshops but of course they’re also for sale out in the main medina streets but I’m sure at much higher prices. I haven’t bought a single souvenir on this trip but being a no-tools-anymore-woodworker I may have to buy something small and light to take home.
At dinnertime, I went back to a vegetarian place I spotted earlier. There’s a set 4-course menu available so I settle into my padded bench surrounded by hanging rugs on the walls, nice and cosy. I’m still learning to slow down my pace but half an hour to take my order when I’m the only one in the place is a little much. I had a moroccan salad, then veggie tagine and falafels with strangely more of the same salad on the side, then veggie couscous then a caramel flan-like thing. This all took 2 hours, but hey.
I rolled back to the room to rest and watch some videos until 11 PM when I went back out to look for any New Year’s celebrations. Short answer, nope. They were literally sweeping up the streets, the restaurants and shops all closed. There were a few dozen tourists wandering around looking for something, we’re all looking at each other like, where is there to go? I did find one local who wanted to sell me hash but when I laughed and said no, he got all butthurt shouting “Why you not buy?” So back to my room, watched London fireworks streaming over the web, chatted Happy New Years wishes with friends and crashed.
In the morning I walked out of the medina and a few miles down the massive beach. It was extreme low tide and the beach was about 150m from water to boardwalk. There were lots of people out, walking, lying in the sun and playing in the water. The surf was peaking about 1m and there were about a dozen surfers out. At the far end of the beach I came across what I can only call the camel renting center. 10 or so camels, lying or standing around, available for rent for a stroll down the beach. These are my first camels in the wild and man, do they stink! Like a bucket of pee left out in the hot sun for a week.
Coming back into town I stopped at the CTM bus station to review their schedule so I can plan my trip back to Tangier in two days. I can get a bus back to Marrakech for 3 hours, then get on the train from there, or get a bus up to Casablanca in 7 hours, then a train from there. Hmmm. I continued to the Supr@tours office and worked with a very helpful girl at the counter. I settled on the bus to Marrakech at the unholy hour of 6:45 AM, then first class direct train to Tangier, arriving at 8:20 PM. I’ll get a taxi to the Grand Socco then walk to the same place I stayed before. 2 days later I’m on the ferry to Italy.
I had a craving for a nutella crepe so I walked through the streets of the medina until I found the shop, bought a diet coke and went back to my room to rest and prepare for my hammam tonight.
So, here are the details of the hammam, feel free to skip over if you’re not interested. I arrived about 15 minutes early, paid the remainder of my fee after my deposit from yesterday and was told to go to the second floor. I walked up and was directed to sit on a leather couch. I have to say, the place is painted and decorated to a very nice style, with relaxing music piped in from somewhere, just like what you would expect at a high-end spa.
About 15 minutes after my appointment time, my assigned hammam lady showed me to a locker room and I was given a small robe, a pair of disposable briefs and cheap flip flops that were too small for my feet. It was 6:30 PM so I didn’t begrudge them being a little behind at the end of a busy day.
From the locker room I was guided down the hallway through a glass door where I hung up my robe and went into a steam room. The room had a stone bench on 3 walls and was completely black except for some dim lighting. I sat on the bench and she poured scorching hot water over me with a pot from a barrel. She told me to lie down and she then rubbed the black soap on me, which I’ve read is actually a brown or green olive-oil based soap. She cranked up the steam and left for about 15 minutes. I remembered and went through my yoga relaxation and breathing techniques. She came back in and poured water on me again which I found much cooler but I think it was from the same barrel, my body temperature was just so much higher.
She then led me to a small dark, black room with a black stone pedestal, like a massage bed but hard as a rock. It had a hole at the head end to let the water drain away and I suddenly got an image of a coroner’s table… She then started scrubbing my skin with a mitt covered in what felt like 40 grit sandpaper, almost to the point of pain but not quite. This mitt is very effective as I ended up with a handful of rolled-up dead skin balls when I rubbed my stomach. I flipped over onto my stomach and she did the other side, this is the only part I didn’t like as the stone was really painful on my kneecaps and the bones across the top of my foot. A little rubber pad or something would really help here. After I was rinsed, she used about a liter of a thick cool cream on me and massaged, more like rubbed, for about 15 minutes. She told me to get up and rinse off with the shower head, which I tried but it was clear that this stuff was going to leave a creamy layer on my skin.
I came out of the room and she helped me into a huge thick terrycloth robe with a hood like the Jawa people and led me to a little bed for my final relaxing time. She sprayed a lightly-citrus-scented mist in my face and I laid down. I expected to be led to the next step but nobody came after about 15 minutes so I got up. I was pointed back to the locker and changed and walked back out into the night. So, was it a good experience? Yes! Was it worth $35? Yes! Would I do it again, sure but not on this trip. And I would definitely ask for some kind of padding for my kneecaps!
Feeling refreshed and hungry, I went to a restaurant I had spotted close to my Airbnb. I went inside and was guided to the second floor but there were no open tables, so they made one up for me. I ordered veggie, no-onion tagine. The place was full so it took quite a long time for my order to come but when it did, it was great. The spices were just amazing, best tagine I’ve had since I got to Morocco.
Back to the Airbnb, I find that my Italian host has agreed to accept a new credit card sent by FedEx. I do a Google phone call to Citibank to ask them to send the card but the first thing the agent wants me to do is validate the disputed charge I’ve already talked with them about 3 times. Jeez guys, your fraud handling system should be better than this! In the end, I give her the address and she assures me the card will be waiting for me when I get there in 7 days. We’ll see. Oh and she cancelled my current card without asking. So I have no credit card for 7 days. The risk is low but I wish she had kept the account, with the hold we already had in place until I had my new card in my hand.
The next morning I went into one of the dozen or so men’s haircut places near my room and got a haircut and a shave. I made the mistake of not checking the price first and he pulled out a card showing D200 or $20 which is just insane. I laughed and said “tourist price” and offered him 100 which is still too much. We finally agreed on 140.
I went back to the woodworking co-operative and selected a small hinge-lid box with inlaid mother of pearl and silver paint accents. The sticker on the back said D110 / $11 so I put the money on the counter. The clerk typed 100 into a calculator and gave me back the 10 coin. These pieces are so well done I didn’t want to insult them by trying to bargain but she gave me a discount anyway.
I met a Dutch lady Mayo (I think) and an English guy Rob in a cafe. Mayo has been coming to Morocco for the winter for over 10 years, with her husband and a big dog called Indigo in a Toyota LandCruiser. He passed away this year so she came down on a motorcycle with a sidecar for Indigo. She’s in a campground down at the other end of the beach. Rob works at a transmission engineering company in Shakespeare country, he split with his partner and is travelling through Europe and Morocco for 6 months. It was great trading stories about travel and culture and food. We walked down to their end of the beach just as the sun set and the cold really kicked in. We stopped at a little beach restaurant for drinks and then I took a taxi back to the medina.
I had the exact same tagine as last night. I asked for no onions but when it came out it looked like an onion inside but the waiter said it was fennell. The said they use whatever vegetables they can buy at the market each morning. I’ve had fennell before and it was too strong so I pulled it out and ate the rest, great spices just like yesterday.
Back to the room I went against every instinct in my body and did the one thing any sane computer geek never does. I admit it. I did it. I updated my drivers. My name is Mike and I updated my drivers while I was 13,000 miles away from home. In my defense, I only updated the Lenovo drivers, not with Windows Update. These drivers come direct from the manufacturer are supposed to be better than the Russian Roulette you play with Windows Update. I was really looking for an update to the Wifi app, it’s a single-threaded piece of shit. The geeks know what I’m talking about. It blocks the main message queue for up to a minute while it tries to find its own ass with both hands. Ugh. Anyway, I ended up hosing my sound. No sound from anything, speakers or headphones. Played with the control panel for an hour, tweaking every setting. Nada. Fuck, the 14 hour trip back to Tangier tomorrow is going to suck. Kids, if your computer is working, don’t mess with it.
Essaouira is definitely worth a visit. It seems to be a bit touristy but even now it’s not crowded and the weather is great.
