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Published: March 4th 2008
Essaouira
The classic postcard shot of the Essaouira ramparts as seen from the port - photographers line up at this spot to get their own version.We were looking forward to a long layover in Essaouira, a place that had been given a universal thumbs-up from everyone we'd talked to about Morocco. Essaouira has morphed from its original incarnation as a picturesque fishing town into a hippie hangout (Jimi Hendrix made a fabled visit here in the 60s), an enclave for Moroccan and European artists (picking up annual cultural, music and film festivals along the way), a windsurfing mecca, and then, inevitably, a hot real estate market for European expats and vacationers. Along the way it's developed a tolerant attitude towards foreign influences and mores, and a very comfortable infrastructure that lulls the visitor into sticking around and spending lots of money, which is pretty much what we did.
We decided that, unlike most other Moroccan cities we've visited, we really wanted to stay inside the medina (the walled old city) partly because the streets in Essaouira are relatively wide and easy to negotiate - especially on the bikes - and also because there is really nothing happening for the visitor in the ville nouvelle areas outside the medina. So when we rolled through the Bab es Sebaa gate into Essaouira's medina at the end of
Main mosque, Essaouira
Looking south, Essaouira's long beach, a mecca for windsurfers (OK, pun intended!), can be seen in the background beyond the minaret. our 127km run from Safi, we went straight to Riad Nakhla, the Lonely Planet "Author's Pick" (lots of "local character"). Unfortunately, our room was up 3 dark flights of stairs, had no outside windows, and thanks to its Lilliputian scale - imagine a double bed shoehorned into a cardboard refrigerator carton - definitely had the highest cost/sq meter, at 340dh, of anywhere we've stayed bar none. Although the room itself was bad enough, it can't really be blamed for the omnipresent aroma of cat piss, since this disgusting odor uniformly permeated the entire hotel.
In the morning, we shifted to a new hotel room at Maison Mounia, and for the privilege of paying 40dh less were rewarded with a much larger room (that we are certain had never been urinated in by any feline), opening through double-glazed French doors onto a balcony overlooking the street. With a friendly staff, a sunny roof terrace where we took our breakfast each morning (standard issue in Essaouira) and another great cafe on the ground floor at one of Essaouira's prime people-watching intersections, we were more than satisfied with the Maison Mounia, which would be our base of operations for the next 5
Walls of the medina, Essaouira
Looking from our rooftop terrace towards the Place Orson Welles days.
Since on this trip we've typically stayed in slightly higher-end hotels in the ville nouvelle instead of the smaller medina guesthouses, one of the things we've been missing is the interaction with other backpacker-types like ourselves. We haven't really tapped into the rich store of travel knowledge that's usually shared by word of mouth between travellers thrown together into common circumstances. Also missing has been the multicultural contact - not to minimize what we're getting from the native Morrocans - that occurs by interacting with travelers from so many other countries. So we were glad when, at breakfast on the terrace our first morning at Maison Mounia, we met Dima (short for Dmitri) and Oxana, vacationing in sunny Morocco on their holiday from frigid Moscow, the first Russian tourists we've ever encountered.
Russian tourism is a relatively new phenomenon, especially outside the old Eastern Bloc countries, made possible not only by the glasnost of 80's and breakup of the Soviet Union in the 90's, but most especially by the resurgence of the ruble as Russia's increasing petroleum exports coincide with a rising tide of record oil prices. Dima and Oxana, artistic, liberal 30-something professionals, confirmed that Moscow
Oxana and Dima
Soaking up the sun in Essaouira, the only Russian tourists we've ever met. is now one of the most expensive places in the world to live, and were thankful to have bought their high-rise flat before the most recent upsurge in Moscow real estate prices. We peppered them with questions about life in contemporary urban Russia, economics and politics, and for the first time began to get a bit of that intrigue about a country that eventually leads to a visit, even to a place we formerly had no interest in traveling to.
We spent some time with them over a couple of days kicking around town, including a visit to the busy fishing port. Our quest for a boat trip out to the Isle of Mogador just offshore from the port, home to the endangered Eleanora's falcon and the site of an ancient Roman processing center for murex (a sea snail which yields a rare purple dye), was quashed by "bad weather", though it looked perfectly good to us as we strolled the quay in shirtsleeves. Down at the docks Oxana was preoccupied shooting pictures with her old-school 35mm Nikon and from Dima's exasperated expression I understood how Kate feels when I'm pulling off the road every 5 minutes with MY
The port of Essaouira
Essaouira's traditional livelihood of commercial fishng hasn't yet been eclipsed by tourism... camera. Oxana is an art director in a Moscow ad agency and supervises the team of "4 lazy boys" who do all the agency's computer graphics work, so they were naturally interested in browsing some of Essaouira's many art galleries, picking up a number of works by local artists.
One of the must-dos in Essaouira is picking out a freshly caught specimen from the dockside fish market and having it expertly cooked at one of the fish grilling stalls down by the port. (We were puzzled when Dima passed over the delectable shellfish until we remembered that he was Jewish - he has also travelled in Israel and speaks Hebrew besides Russian, English and some German.) Although no bargain, the waterfront ambience was worth the price, sitting out in the sunshine at long paper-covered tables with the aromatic smoke of grlling fish wafting about and hungry seagulls squawking overhead. Mindful of their imminent return to frozen Moscow, Dima and Oxana were relentless sun-seekers and as heedless of the consequences to their white Russian complexions as a couple of English tourists on a 3-day Spanish holiday. For his efforts, Dima ended up with a burn line across the middle of
his forehead marking the lower extent of his trademark knit ski cap.
Inspired by Dima and Oxana's own art shopping spree, we bought a small painting on masonite by a local artist and then had to figure out how to get it home. The national Maroc Poste service has a well deserved reputation for reliability, but that doesn't necessarily mean they make it easy for you. Kate has been most willing to run the post office gauntlet on this trip (being an afficionado of the quaint medium known as "post cards"), so she joined the fray at the local branch office near our hotel. The gallery bundled up our painting with cardboard backers, but the normal protocol for overseas mail requires the clerk in the P.O. to actually lay eyes upon the contents, so there's a somewhat frantic "final sealing" stage that's inevitably performed at the window with packing tape, paper and scissors (none of which, naturally, are readily at hand) while the line of waiting patrons grows increasingly restless.
In our case, the sealing-up was actually facilitated by one of those patrons, Asidinah, the owner of the Bazar La Baraka carpet shop just around the corner, who
took pity on us and sent one of his minions racing for the necessary packing tools and materials. Our shipping task completed (and verified by the successful delivery less than two weeks later to our tenants in Boulder) we naturally paid a visit to his shop, and in his excellent English he gave us some interesting insights about the recent history and current developments in Essaouira, and gave us some pertinent travel info about the section of the coast that we'll be traveling through next. Also, being a real estate investor in Essaouira, he painted us a sobering picture of the local market for apartments and riads (multi-story houses built around a central courtyard) whose prices are typically denominated in euros and rival those of coastal California for price/sq meter. Ouch!
Our perennial search for reading material also brought us to the Gallerie Aida, nominally a store full of old jewelry, artifacts and antique furnishings, but where Kate had spied an odd shelf of high quality literature in English. (I picked up and subsequently devoured Michael Ondaatje's deeply absorbing "Anil's Ghost"). The key to these foreign-language materials was the unexpected English fluency of the proprieter, Joseph, an established member
Cafe central in Essaouira
Alot of the activity in Essaouira is inactivity - it's easy to make a couple of cafe au laits last all morning. of an old Essaouira family and one of the few Jews to have remained here after the initial emigration to Israel of most of Morocco's Jewish community in 1949 and their final exodus following the Six Day's War. Joseph is an engaging raconteur, a businessman, aesthete, and world traveler, and over the course of several conversations in his shop shared with us his views on a wide range of subjects including the state of Essaouira, Morocco, and the world at large. It was especially intriguing to hear about Morocco from the point of view of an insider who also, as a Jew, has a kind of outsider's perspective, and to have it rendered so articulately in English.
Along with these conversations with the locals, the walks on the beach and visits to the souks and shops, our interlude in Essaouira also included a fair amount of "hang time" in the local cafes, one of the standard tourist activities as well as one of the cheapest. Prices in Essaouira seemed quite reasonable for a Euro-centric tourist enclave, no doubt due to the intense competition - everywhere you look there's another restaurant, cafe, sandwich stall or pizza joint, and one of
Carpet Alley, Essaouira
It's shop till you drop in Essaouira's many galleries, carpet shops and woodworking emporiums. the pleasures of Essaouira is sampling some place different at every meal. For the first time in Morocco, we actually found ice cream being served in one of the ubiquitous "glaciers" - surprising, since Moroccans consider it to be too cold for ice cream in their 70 degree "winters" - and we took liberal advantage of the 5dh/scoop bargain prices. And we were kind of expecting to find true internet cafes in Essaouira - heck, we found one without even trying in Safi - but even after exhaustive searching, computer in hand, we didn't find open networks emanating from any of Essaouira's many sidewalk cafes. However, we did locate a hipper-than-thou Italian trattoria along the waterfront whose network signal was strong enough to let us send email and browse the net - without paying their inflated prices for pasta and pizza - while perched outside on the oceanside ramparts of the medina, right above the waves. Web surfing in a nearly literal sense!
After nearly a week off the bikes, we reluctantly prepared to leave Maison Mounia and head off to explore more of the coast south of Essaouira. It felt like the "vacation" was over and it was
Kate emailing on the ramparts
No wifi cafes yet in Essaouira, but a waterfront restaurant had an open connection we could use while watching the waves. time to get back to our real "job" of bicycle touring. Strange how perspectives can be warped in the absence of normal imperatives like going to work, paying the mortgage and shoveling snow...
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Check our expanded gallery of travel photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_hoge/collections/72157613626339376 And visit our home page at:
http://web.mac.com/steve_hoge
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hamid
non-member comment
hi steve;hi kate .how are you?i hope that you are all right .about your vacation in essaouira i can say that you chose the right country and the right city also the right hotel (located near our shop).really as a moroccan we feel glad when we see people spend their holidays and leave happy .we want good tourists who come and enjoy time and discouver our country ;we don't want bad people who come just to lought on us and prostitute. so if it is your first time you visit morocco i hope that it is not the last time.and have you good time. hamid from essaouira