From the desert to the sea

Leaving Marrakech, we headed out towards a fishing and beach town on the Atlantic coast of Morocco called Essaouira.

The town was really beautiful. Much cleaner and less touristy than Marrakech, and all the houses in the old town are painted white, with blue doors and shutters.



We stayed in a great little hotel right in the centre for less that 15 euro for the two of us! In the mornings we managed to sleep through the call to prayer (which goes off at about 4am), but were instead woken by donkeys at the much nicer time of 8 or 9am who clopped down our street each day.



We met a local guy, Suofian, here. Suofian works in one of the many leather shops in town, and wanted to practice his English on us. We chatted to him quite a bit, and he invited us to have local tagine with him one night. The tagines in Morocco have all been tasty, but have all had the same taste, so we were getting a bit bored of them. But the place that Suofian took us to didn´t have a menu - you had to bring your own ingredients and they cooked them for you! Suofian´s brother was a fisherman, so he had turned up to the restaurant with 2 fish. The restaurant cooked the fish with vegies and Moroccan spices to make one of the tastiest (and cheapest... 50 euro cents each!) tagines that we´ve eaten!


This is a tagine... but not the fish one we ate with Suofian

It has been interesting travelling through Morocco during Ramadan. In some of the places with less tourists, it is really hard to even find someone selling food during the day. We have also noticed some people getting cranky late in the afternoon (totally understandable after not eating for 14 hours!), and have seen a few fights break out over really small things. While we´ve tried to respect Ramadan as much as possible, and not eat in public if we have found food, we can´t do without water during the day. More than once we´ve had someone shake their head at us and say "That´s not allowed... it´s Ramadan" while we´ve been drinking from our water bottles.