Our time on the coast was the chance we needed to slow down, relax, and enjoy the smaller details. Essaouira is a lovely coastal city with a huuuuuge beach…. that you can’t swim at. Seems like a cruel joke to look at so much water and not be able to get in it, but we don’t mess around with surf and currents. The ever-present onshore wind makes it a kitesurfer’s paradise and the camel trains parading down the sand at sunset earned more than a few frames on my memory card, too.
The city has an incredibly charming medina that is small in all the right ways and a harbourfront where, for about a dollar apiece, you can buy oysters that are four times larger than anything we’ve seen at home. Apparently, the oysters fished out of the sea off Essaouira’s coast are too big to be desirable to the international market, so instead they’re sold domestically where they are slurped up by plenty of happy customers. We helped one young vendor move closer to wrapping up her sales for the day, hoping it would mean that she would be free to go and be a kid. I got especially excited about our purchase of mantis shrimp that we were going to cook for dinner, but we found out later that they were spoiled so our dinner became a feast of roasted chicken from a takeout spot across the road from our apartment. Note: when you order a takeout meal from a roasted meat spot in Morocco, it comes with A LOT of side dishes. For $10, we ended up with enough food for three meals.
The city walls are walkable and we enjoyed a stroll along them as well as a good meander along the sand beyond the walls, where the shoreline is rugged and windblown, and the views of the imposing walls and rocky seabed add to the atmosphere. When we needed a rest each day, we pulled up two alleyway stools at Café Pause for a caffeine hit and a chance to people watch as tour groups moved through.
My debriding efforts in Fes may have been nearly soul-destroying but they seemed to have paid off: my knee had healed enough by our last morning in Essaouira that I excitedly went out for my first run since arriving in Morocco and felt all the more grateful for the way my body is supporting my movement during this adventure. Afterwards, we packed up the car and made the drive to Oualidia, a small coastal town about three hours away.
The road between Essaouira and Oualidia offered brilliant sea views. From one vantage point, we spotted what looked to be a village of boats on the sand, so we detoured to Abellbatach, only to discover what appeared to be an invading army of abandoned azure vessels, all stranded on the beach; all pointing inland in the same direction. It felt eerily serene, as though we’d missed the war.
As road trips go, this was a particularly eventful day! We went from imagining sea pirates to raiding casbahs, all in the space of an hour. A second detour brought us to an abandoned fortress, which we moved around with determination to find a way past the thorny bushes being used to keep the goats and sheep penned in so that we could explore this magnificent place that has been left to rot. This is also where I learned that there are such things as camel and horse graveyards: because I can’t smell, I (almost literally) stumbled upon a carcass on the other side of a bush I’d been moving around, and then noticed an assortment of other large bones around the area.
Mindful of the afternoon heat and the fact that we had meat in the car, it was time to get back on the road. Upon arriving in Oualidia, we discovered we’d made a critical error and booked our stay for the following month, but were relieved to hear that they still had space for us if we wouldn’t mind giving them an hour or two for cleaning. That was the perfect opportunity for us to go for a walk and see what the town had to offer. Oualidia has a small permanent population, but is clearly popular with expats and vacationing Moroccans, who come to swim in the shallow lagoon and enjoy the plethora of fresh seafood available.
We didn’t get up too much while we were in town, but we enjoyed every part of our stay. We had unforgettable meals at Au Crabe that included an embarrassingly large crab and about six complementary dishes for each dish that we did order. I continued my now-persistent search for loquats, having learned that these are now firmly in the ranks of my favourite fruit. We also visited the grill restaurants near the RV park to pre-order a fish dinner (after negotiating the price and the inclusions, of course) and returned later that evening for a true feast. We visited the oyster shacks each day for a little snack – and about a cup of seawater – on our way by. We each did some running, although not as much as intended. Plans got cancelled one morning when we left our shoes out overnight only to discover that we’d unexpectedly had our third day of rain in the last four months. The rain and grey skies were a good excuse to take it easy and slow our pace, which was especially helpful since I’d been struggling to sleep well and our non-stop pace felt like it was starting to catch up with us. An afternoon of rest is always a good idea once in awhile, and I happily seized the opportunity while Rich went for a haircut.
After six peaceful nights on Morocco’s beautiful coast, it was time to pack up the car to take a roundabout route to Marrakech, where our good friends would join us.
Grateful for: a chance to rest