Down the Atlantic Coast of Morocco

It doesn’t take long, when traveling in Morocco, to expand one’s vocabulary.  Terms like medina, souq, tagine, hammam, kasbah, and palmeraie quickly roll of one’s tongue; they are vital elements of Moroccan life and one cannot begin to describe the country without integrating these words in one’s colloquial language.  If these words are incomprehensible to you now, dear reader, trust that over the next several Moroccan-themed blog posts, you’ll become well-acquainted with them.

Bruno and I spent just under two weeks traveling from Tangier Med, our port of entry into Morocco, to Taroudant, the meeting point for our family reunion.  Unlike most overlanders, who head straight for the fascinating and challenging Atlas Mountains, we opted to take the coastal route south.  We’d had enough of cold weather in Europe and didn’t fancy dealing with possible sub-zero temperatures.

After our failed bird-watching adventure in Moulay Besselham, we headed for El Jadida, a colonial Portuguese coastal city with a small 16^th century medina.  A medina is an old city, often surrounded by high walls, or ramparts, that were used as fortification.  Medinas are a common feature in Morocco; El Jadida was my first.  We entered the medina through a tall gate and entered its maze of alleys.  This, I’ve since learned, is the charm of a medina – wandering aimlessly around, and getting lost in, its alleys.

Until now, the only fortified old town I’d ever visited in Africa was Harar, in Ethiopia, but El Jadida was thankfully much more pleasant to wander around in.  The locals here left us entirely alone, except to reply to my own friendly greetings of Salaam Alekum.

Since I’d just visited Portugal a few weeks before, I naturally also compared El Jadida’s old town to the ones we’d seen in Portugal.  Here, too, there were ceramic tiles on the floors and walls inside old wooden doorways.  Here, too, were pastel colors of blue, orange, pink, and white.  But the paint was chipped and faded, the walls crumbled, and the clothes hanging on lines were djellabahs and headscarves.

We popped into one open doorway, which was in fact a communal bakery.  In the corner a fire blazed in a mud-brick oven, ready for the women of the medina to appear with their family’s round, uncooked bread on trays.  Through another doorway was the ancient Portuguese water cistern, rediscovered by accident a hundred years ago, and used as the location for the riot scene in Orson Welles’ Othello.

We climbed up to the ramparts and viewed the city from above.  Fishing boats from the nearby pier bobbed in the water, the seagulls hovering around them.  On the opposite side lay the new town for which El Jadida is named (“the new one”).  We descended the ramparts and wandered that way, entering by chance the souq, or market.  There were stacks of fresh produce, animal-print robes and leggings, an incredibly variety of different round breads, spices, olives, dates, and dried legumes stacked so high it seemed against the forces of gravity.  Bruno and I bought a few food items for prices that did not seem to require bargaining.  Then we wandered back to our campsite along the corniche at the edge of the city beach.

South from El Jadida, the road hugged the coast, offering stunning views of cliffs, lagoons, and long stretches of sandy beach.  The land bordering the coast was a patchwork of agricultural fields and rocky pasture for goats.  Further still, the road veered inland, through forests of prickly argan trees and arid brown hills that looked more typically African than what I’d seen so far in Morocco.  When we re-emerged at the coast near Essaouira, we came upon tons of surf spots and manicured beaches.  It wasn’t quite swimming weather for me, but it was perfect for toes-in-the-water beach walks.

Essaouira was, by far, the most touristic place I’d visited so far in Morocco.  There were camels, decorated in colorful robes, sat on the long beach waiting to offer tourists rides along the sand.  Essaouira’s medina, which was much larger than El Jadida’s, was brimming with multi-colored tourist shops exhibiting shoes, ceramics, carpets, spices, bags, sweets, CDs, traditional medicine, and much more.

As I sat at a trendy tourist restaurant in a square sipping on tea and devouring a delicious plate of vegetarian Moroccan food, I pondered the discomfort that I felt in this tourist town.  On the one hand, the glitzy items being sold in the shops piqued my curiosity.  On the other hand, I didn’t like the false-friendly invitations to look in each shop.  On one hand, I was happy to eat vegetarian food, so hard-to-find in Morocco, but on the other, I was paying ten times what I’d paid at local restaurants so far.  The snake charmer baskets, genie lamps, turban-wearing men, and musicians playing old instruments in front of our restaurant all seemed so contrived; the young Western tourists all sported expensive “cultural” clothes with perfectly-coiffed bed-head; and I realized that I prefer a totally ugly but authentic modern Moroccan town to this.

Once I realized that, I got my zen back, wandered around happily, and played along with the shopkeepers.  I appreciated the everyday scenes around each new alley.  I haggled for local prices on fruit and vegetables.  I admired the towers of spices and olives.

Bruno and I wandered to the fishing port just outside the ramparts.  It was positively bustling.  Small blue fishing boats were tied up and bobbing in the water in front of the castle-like Skala du Port.  On land, fishermen were displaying their day’s catch – an incredible variety of seafood, from fish and eel to squid, sea-urchin, mussels, crab, and shark.  We sloshed through puddles of stinky seawater and seafood-guts under such a cloud of seagulls that I covered my head with my scarf to protect it from incoming projectile poop.

To relax after the chaos of Essaouira’s medina, port, and souq, Bruno and I opted to try out a hammam, a Turkish-style bath that I’d not gotten to try out when we were in Turkey this spring.  Almost every Moroccan city has at least one public hammam, where locals go to scrub themselves with hot water and savon noir (black soap).  In some touristic places, you can also do a private hammam at a spa; this is what we did.  Bruno and I were led into a hot, steamy room covered in tiles.  We were laid down on hot cement blocks near a bath of water and, over the next hour, were splashed, soaped, scrubbed, washed, rinsed, repeat.  After, we shifted rooms and got a one-hour relaxation massage.  By the time we emerged from the spa after sunset, I was walking on clouds.  I’d never felt so clean, so pampered, or so relaxed in my life.  It won’t be my last hammam in Morocco, that’s for sure.

Before we knew it, we’d reached Agadir, Morocco’s premier sea-sun-sand destination, and one we would soon visit with my parents, who’d soon be flying into Morocco.  It was time to leave Morocco’s Atlantic Coast.  We’d leave with a plethora of experiences and, more importantly, an expanded vocabulary.  For with each vocabulary word I acquired, I increased my understanding of this most-complex, and most-intriguing, of countries.