Marrakesh & Chilling in Essaouira

This past weekend was Eid ul-Fitr, a celebration for the end of Ramadan. Eid is as important in the Muslim world as Christmas is in the Christian world; family comes to visit, the fast is broken, and feasts are held. Because Eid fell on a Monday, there was no class on Monday or Tuesday, giving us a four-day weekend. We couldn’t let such a long weekend go to waste, so we decided to go somewhere far. My friend Laura and I organized a five-day trip to the south of Morocco. We were a group of nine—four guys and five girls. On Friday we left after our classes for a seven-hour train ride from Meknes to Marrakesh. We had a compartment to ourselves, making us feel like we were on the Hogwarts Express. (Unfortunately they didn’t have any chocolate frogs or every flavored beans.) We arrived at about 11 pm in Marrakesh, in what is possibly the nicest train station I’ve ever seen. From there we took taxis to the main plaza in Marrakesh, the Djemaa el-Fna. The Djemaa el-Fna is an enourmous plaza full of snake charmers, performing monkeys, acrobats, peddlers selling traditional medicines, henna tattoo artists, and lots of enormous food stalls selling everything from snails to roasted chickens to fresh squeezed orange juice.

The Djemaa el-Fna has been offering these same attractions for over a thousand years. Today locals frequent the square as much as tourists. Just off the main square are the souks where you can find everything from shoes, scarves and jewelry to hand-carved furniture, enormous rugs and pirated DVDs.

Our first night in Marrakesh we were planning on staying at a hotel where you could supposedly sleep on a mattress on the roof for 30 DH a person (about 4 dollars). However, while we were looking for that hotel, we found another one that had a giant tent on the roof that was used as a lounge with eight couches and a mattress. We decided to rent that instead of the mattresses. It was the same price, and perfect for the nine of us. That night we had dinner in the plaza at one of the food stalls and then wandered into the souks.

Marrakesh is very interesting and exciting, but it gets grinding and very tiring. It’s a huge tourist destination, with fat retired European couples piling on and off enormous tour buses all day long. As a result, many of the Moroccans that work in and around the plaza are very pushy and forceful, always telling you to buy this, look at this hotel, eat at this restaurant, do this, do that, etc. Plus you always have to be on your guard because many shop-owners try to rip off tourists who don’t know what items are worth. For example, that first night at dinner, the cooks kept bringing us food that we didn’t order and then expected us to pay for it, plus they charged us at prices much higher than what was listed on the menu. However, since everything is cheaper in Morocco, getting ripped off means paying the equivalent of twelve dollars for something that should have cost four. I didn’t realize it until after we had paid, but the price of that meal was negotiable.

The next afternoon, we took a three-hour bus ride to Essaouira, a small port city on the Atlantic coast. Essaouira is everything that Marrakesh isn’t. It was small, it was quiet, it was laid back, and the only tourists were young backpackers like ourselves.

We were only planning to spend one night in Essaouira, but we all loved it so much that we ended up staying two more nights. Essaouira is a beautiful whitewashed town with lots of little restaurants and riads. It gained fame as a hippy haven in the sixties and seventies, and can boast that Jimi Hendrix came to stay there in the early seventies. Legend has it that his song “Castles Made of Sand” was inspired by a visit to the ruins of an ancient kasbah (fortress) found just two miles south of Essaouira. But despite the legend’s romantic allure, it probably isn’t true because “Castles Made of Sand” was released before Jimi Hendrix visited the city. Today Essaouira is full of young backpackers. Our first night there we met Lorenz, a 22-year-old Belgian college student who speaks amazing English as well as French, Dutch and German. He was traveling alone through Morocco on a five-week journey and we ended up hanging out with him most of our time in Essaouira. That first night, we rented an apartment in the central medina for 400 DH per night. It had two double beds, a large sofa, and its own bathroom with a shower. It was meant to sleep four, but we were able to fit nine. Three of us slept on the couches and three people slept in each double bed. It was cozy, but a lot more fun than being split up into two separate rooms. It was a pretty nice apartment and it only came out to 45 DH a person per night, or about 6 dollars. (The exchange rate is a little less than 8 DH to 1 USD.)

The next day we met Alvaro, a 32-year-old Spaniard who had cycled all the way to Essaouira from Madrid on his road bike. It was his first solo trip and it had taken him 19 days to get to Essaouira. He spoke very good English and turned out to be a graphic designer for a Spanish newspaper. We invited Lorenz and him to join us for dinner that night. That Sunday afternoon, a group of four or five of us decided to go play soccer on the beach. We ran into Lorenz as we were on our way to buy a cheap soccer ball for 20 DH. As we were walking down the beach two little 8-year-old Moroccan boys started chasing us trying to catch our soccer ball, so we invited them to play with us. After playing for a few minutes, another Moroccan boy of about 17 joined us, as did a Spaniard in his early twenties who was coincidentally also named Alvaro. After an hour we were all exhausted and went swimming.

Afterwards a few of us decided to go walking a few miles down the beach to the sand dunes and the half-covered kasbah that supposedly inspired Jimi Hendrix. In the face of the Atlantic’s harsh winds, the ruins are slowly disappearing under the surrounding sand dunes, making it a very cool sight to see. There was no one else there but a few goats and us. Our last full day, I went windsurfing for a bit. I hadn’t been windsurfing in over 2 years, but I picked it back up faster than I expected and did all right. That night we ate with Lorenz and Alvaro at a fancy European restaurant overlooking the ocean.

Unfortunately it was dark so you could only hear the crashing of the waves, but the food was amazing. I split a swordfish dish and goat tajine with caramelized figs and walnuts with one of my friends. That night, like most nights, we ended it smoking hookah in our apartment with the nine of us plus Lorenz. On Tuesday morning, we left on a bus for Marrakesh at 6 am.

On Tuesday, four of us returned to Meknes by train to avoid missing Wednesday classes, but five of us, including me, stayed another night. We stayed in an inexpensive hotel about a two-minute walk from the Djemaa el-Fna. That night we wandered through the souks some more and each bought a few items. Afterwards we had dinner in a café overlooking the Djemaa el-Fna, which was full of what must have been somewhere between ten to twenty thousand people. The following day we left for Meknes by train around 1pm, concluding one of the best trips of my life.