In the morning, Rashid came to pick us up and drive us out to Essaouira, which was about 3.5 hours west of Marrakesh, out on the coast. In contrast to the road through the High Atlas, this was a wide smoothly paved highway that went pretty much straight out to the Atlantic Ocean. We all briefly woke up when Rashid pulled over to show us a very peculiar sight.
In Morocco, there is a nut called "argan" and it grows in a tree. These trees have fussy climate requirements and actually only grow in a limited area of Morocco. This area starts within a few dozen kilometers from the coast. Moroccans like to squeeze argan nuts for their oil, which has a very intense flavor - almost like a cross between a Marcona almond and a peanut. Because of the limited area in which the tree grows, this oil is not cheap.
As it so happens, goats are *very* fond of argan nuts. And they will go to great lengths to get it. Thus, we saw this when we pulled over:
For a few seconds, we were certain that the goat herders put them up there as a joke to get tourists to stop and give them some money. But nope, they really do climb the trees just to reach the nuts.
In the early afternoon, we reached our final stop - Essaouira.
Before we got into town we spotted a guy with a camel. Dante promised his nephew that he would be riding a camel, so that's just what he did:
As Rashid left us at the Port, Jorge Sanchez came out to greet us. We found his place on Airbnb and you can see my review there as well.
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| The view from our room. |
Our first meal in Essouira was at the fish market. It's off the main path but if you just follow your nose, you can't miss it.
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| These cats are living the dream! |
What you do is walk through the market and select the fish, squid, crabs, or shrimp that you want and tell them how much you want. Everything is freshly caught just that morning. They weigh it for you and then they have you take a seat, while they take your selection to the back and grill it up for you.
If we were to go a second time, what we would have done is refused the seat and paid for the bag of seafood. Then we would have taken the seafood back out to the main street and go across to where there was a nice clean courtyard with several restaurants around it that are all happy to grill your catch for you and allow you to sit in a much cleaner looking (and less...scented) environment. This was what Jorge recommended. But they took our catch to the grill before we could protest, so we just ate it there. In retrospect, it's a small miracle that none of us really got ill during the trip. But it's hard to complain - it was a very tasty meal. Travel sites say that the fish is expensive but that wasn't our experience. We ended up paying about $10 per person. That's not dirt cheap, but we had a *lot* of seafood.
After eating the late lunch, we found the local Ensemble Artisanal which was much smaller than Marrakesh's. Nonetheless, we found a silversmith there who created jewelry by taking small bands of silver and curled them into intricate patterns and then flamed them until they merged together.
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