Essaouira, Rain, and the Balloon Dispute

Morocco Road Trip

The Long Way to Marrakech

Ourika, or The Road That Fights Back

Essaouira, Rain, and the Balloon Dispute

Fourteen Hours to the Sahara Desert

Blue Walls and Beggars in Uniform

The Last Three Days: Blue, White, and Home

We left Ourika early. There was nothing holding us there, not after the waterfalls had already made their case the day before, and the Atlantic coast had been waiting long enough.

Three Hours West

The drive to Essaouira takes just under three hours if the rain cooperates, which ours did not. It rained for most of it, the steady, committed kind that turns the landscape pewter and makes the road meditative whether you want it to be or not. Not unpleasant, exactly. Just wet.

Somewhere along the route, we passed through a town where roughly one in every two cars was a Peugeot from the 1970s. Not restored. Not curated. Simply still running, or running adjacent, in various states of oxidation and optimism. Hundreds of them. Hood ornaments intact, body panels negotiating with rust, each one a small argument that a car is finished only when it decides to be. I did not catch the name of the town. I wish I had.

The camels appeared in the fields somewhere after that, unhurried in the rain, doing what camels do, which is mostly to look as though they find the entire situation beneath comment.

Arrival

Essaouira requires you to park outside the gates and walk in. This is reasonable. The guard who watched the car was less so. He appointed his own tip before we had finished the sentence, a figure that landed just below what I had planned to give him, the kind of outcome that feels like losing even when it is not. We paid, walked through the gate, and let it go.

The riad greeted us in French, which is to say properly. The woman at the desk delivered a complete orientation of the city with the fluency of someone who has given it many times and still means it: the harbor, the ramparts, the souks, the fish market, and the best time to walk where. We took notes and went out.

The Harbor

The harbor at Essaouira is working wood and Atlantic light. Fishing boats in blues and reds, salt-crusted, practical, the kind of vessels that have a job and do it. I have sailed enough to know what the Atlantic does to boats that are not built for it, and these were built for it. I admired them from the dock with a sailor’s respect and absolutely no desire to take one out. The open ocean here is not the Mediterranean. It has opinions.

We found postcards. We found stamps, this time through official channels, or something closer to official than the man in the chair in Marrakech. The postcrossing supply chain continues.

The Balloon Summit

In the medina, sitting on a terrace near one of the main squares, we saw two elderly men, each selling balloons, who had entered into a territorial dispute of considerable passion and absolutely no urgency. The argument concerned positioning: who was entitled to stand where and why the other was wrong about it. It went on. Neither yielded. The balloons floated above it all in cheerful indifference. We watched for longer than was strictly necessary, because it was the best free theater we had seen all trip.

The Fish Market

The fish market is where you buy your catch and carry it to one of the nearby restaurants to have it cooked. The idea is sound, and the atmosphere is lively, smoke and salt, and the specific confidence of people who eat well and know it. The selection that afternoon was thin, the local catch having apparently decided to take the day off. We browsed, considered, and moved on.

The medina here is the best kind to get lost in: walled and winding but not hostile, the streets narrow enough to be interesting and wide enough not to feel trapped. Blue and white walls. Cats on ledges. Doorways that lead somewhere you were not expecting. We walked without an agenda for a while, which is the only correct way to walk a medina.

Fishburger and Flemish Diplomacy

We ended up at a small place that does fish burgers, which is not what the guidebooks lead with, but is, as it turns out, exactly right after a long day of walking. At the next table, two Flemish women were handling the attentions of a pair of local men with a strategy I had not encountered before: they told them they were Chinese. Whether this worked or simply introduced a new layer of confusion, I cannot say. But the fish burger was good, and the company, in the broader sense, was entertaining.

Dessert at Mifan. Then back to the riad. Early to bed. Tomorrow we drive east, deep into the interior, toward the desert.

The road towards Essaouira

Catsin Essaouira

Essaouira

Essaouira

Essaouira