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 ... read more

Rabat and Casablanca got placed on our agenda not so much because we wanted to see them as much as they were in our way, their positions on the Atlantic making them unavoidable if we wanted to follow the coast road south. Both turned out to have their own interest (or are we simply interestable?) making them worth the few days we spent in each. Rabat was the logical place to meet the coast on way west from Meknes, especially since we'd timed our arrival to coincide with a big storm blowing in off the Atlantic. We arrived ready to hunker down at the Hotel Splendide, picked from the Lonely Planet as a good compromise between its location in the downtown area and its proximity to the medina - plus the price, natch', which yielded a ... read more

The main attraction of Larache turned out to be the very cheap (280dh) and very comfortable Hotel Espana, where we had a newly renovated room with good beds, lots of hot water, sat TV, a balcony overlooking the main square (with brand-new double-glazed French doors to keep out the din) and - not least - free wifi! But once we'd walked the corniche, dodging the garbage piles, and eaten a couple of times in the ocean-view Balcon Atlantico, we'd pretty much "done the town." Larache is a industrial fishing city with a big commercial anchovy and squid fleet, a seriously engineered rivermouth breakwater, and an impressive lighthouse (easily mistaken for a minaret) that helps guide the boats back from their nighttime fishing trips. To be fair, we did visit the one site worth seeing near Larache, ... read more

Our next stop after Gibraltar was technically North Africa, but still not exactly Morocco: the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Ceuta is a vestigial holdover from the time that Spain claimed all of northern Morocco as a colonial possession (dividing the imperial spoils with the French) but only Ceuta, Melilla and a few insignificant Mediterranean rock outcrops are left. Ceuta and Melilla are close analogues of Gibraltar, foreign enclaves isolated on strategic peninsulas, and their retention by Spain make its perennial demands for the return of Gibraltar ring ironically hollow. Nominally, we chose Ceuta as our next destination because it allowed us to bypass Tangier, whose notorious reputation as a European day-tripper's hellhole put us off (think: African Tijuana), and because we could then start our tour of Morocco by cycling along the Mediterranean coast, eventually turning ... read more

A funny thing happened on the way to Ronda...we were sitting on the comfortable "fast train" from Seville to our next cycling point in the hill town of Ronda, and Kate idley pulled out the LP guide and started paging through the section on Granada. "Oh, too bad we're not going to see Granada and the famous Alhambra castle. It sounds beautiful, right at the base of the Sierra Nevada." A few minues of discussion ensued, and so rather than transferring to the Granada-Ronda train, we instead transferred to the Ronda-Granada train going the opposite direction, and that's how we ended up spending a couple of days in in the beautiful city of Granada. And we did indeed see the Alhambra Palace, made famous (apparently - I didn't focus much on literature...) by Washington Irving's "Tales ... read more