southern excursion days 5 and 6

I spent the first hour or so of the drive to Essaouira hemming the scarf I bought in Rissani. It’s an extra big scarf of a dark cobalt blue dipped in black on the ends. It’s extra big because you can wrap it around your head to create a proper turban-type thing. Because it’s a desert town, everybody in Rissani, even men, wears a scarf for when sandstorms kick up suddenly. Anyway, the hemming was less a display of my domestic skill than it was a way to keep the scarf ends from fraying.

You’ve probably noticed I like scarves by now. It would be a bad habit, buying all these lengths of different fabrics, except this is Morocco, and what is more feminine and proper than scarves?

Driving through all this farmland, I got to thinking about fertility. The whole country is fairly popping with life: there’s farmland and herds of animals everywhere, oodles of little children, and more puppies and kittens than you could shake a stick at, not to mention the emergent and rich Amazigh culture. Fertility isn’t limited here.

Essaouira is a beach town, even in the winter, when pasty Europeans fly south to get sunburned. The town was Portuguese for 200 years, from the 1500s to the 1700s, so it has European-looking ramparts and towers ringing the medina and port. We spent the afternoon wandering around the medina, because there are no sights, unless you count the beaches. Again, lots of tourists and the same old stuff in the tourist souqs in addition to the goods made of thuya wood, which looks like mahogany.

Essaouira is known as a surf/hippie town, so some of the young Moroccan men sport quantities of dreadlocks. Surfers could be seen riding the muddy waves of the cove.

The next morning the bus left for Rabat, but we weren’t on it. Only six people were, in the end. Most people chose to stay in Essaouira or went back to Marrakech for the weekend. We strolled along the beach, sat at cafes, and relaxed all day. A high point of the day that I will mention is our vegetarian lunch at a vegetarian café (catering to tourists no doubt) because it was, guess what, made of entirely vegetables. It was beautiful.

A group of us got a room at a hotel directly opposite the wall and ocean. It wasn’t the best of hotels, but hey, we’re students and we’re cheap. It was nice because our room opened onto the terrace, so our window looked out over the walls and ocean. Middle-of-the-night bathroom runs were very scenic because you could see the fishing boats cresting the horizon and making their way to the port. And the clear night sky filled with stars, that was good too.