Dar Marhaba Essaouira

Got up to another really tasty breakfast had a terrible nights sleep as some spanish girls that were staying in our Riad got up with the call to prayer at 5am and they were going off on a trip to the desert! You can go on a camel to the desert and stay overnight sleeping in a traditional tent and eating traditional food something that we would have done had we had more time.<br><br>We decided to go for a little walk around and try and buy ...

... to mention food and lodging) donations from Twitter followers!<br><br>3. And most interesting of all - the lad from northern England turned out to be a professional engineer-turned-artist knee-deep in designing elaborate and intricate "crop circles" (apparently a multitude of UFO origin yearnings to the contrary, all such crop circles are a hoax.)<br><br>Ah traveling - ever reliably chock full of serendipity!<br><br><br><br><br><br>

I&#8217;d always had this romantic notion of riding a horse along a deserted beach with the wind blowing through my hair &#8211; well it sure was windy, but it wasn&#8217;t quite as romantic in reality due to having an extremely sore bum!! I won&#8217;t sit down for a week I reckon!! Yep, another dream was realised today.<br><br>At breakfast we mentioned to the owner of the riad we are staying in that we wanted to go horse riding &#8211; he says that he has a friend who could ...

At 7 A.M. we already left the hotel to move north to the ancient port town Essaouira. It was a Pirate port and has a lot of history to tell and to show us.<br><br>The trip was much more dangerously now. The Serpentine is so scary, and the driver of the bus drives like a mad man, but of course, he's just very experienced, but sitting near the window made some people almost sick. The road took ...

... drive back through the winding section (we passed a massive rock that had fallen across the road - bigger than our bus). We passed the outskirts of Marrakech and headed east towards the ocean. We stopped for photos of goats in an argan tree, the men there wanted money for us to take pictures but we all got straight back on the bus and shut the door on them. Drove then to Essaouira, our stop for the next 2 nights. We ...

Breakfast was surprisingly wonderful in my little hotel along the road, I got a very nice French Crepe, a thin crispy pancake, and a fruit salad. The bus to my next destination Essaouira left at 8 am but I didn't want to spoil the day with the sound of an alarm clock. I was sure there would be some other possibility to get there, and I was right. It was the time of some mutton-eating festival in ...

... you will eventually come out at one of the medina ramparts. Ramparts are defensive walls that used to defend a city from potential aggressors and also had important symbolic functions like representing the status and independence of the communities they embraced. Essaouira's ramparts are largely still intact and quite impressive. The life behind the walls was interesting as children, cats, dogs and their families scattered around delivering food to each others ...

... around. We were rained on yesterday for the first time, we ran about like a couple of headless chickens before diving into a cafe to have a calming drink and peer out fearfully until it stopped. Then when we came out it was like it had never rained at all, I guss that either the ground is so hot or so dry or both that all the water just gets soaked up or evapourates straight away.

... we were shown to our bus, and someone tried to put our bags on the bus. The man literally took the bag from my hands as I was placing it on, and did it himself. Then I took the bag from him and put it on myself, thinking I was hip to this trick and could get out of this one. Then he took it again. I was getting annoyed, but with the language barrier and the fact that this guy seemed to have some agreement with the guy who took our tickets, there wasn't ...

... for its wood. The fine inlay of ebony, mother of pearl and lemonwood in cedar is famous throughout Morocco. So too are the trays and urns made from cedar burr. The smell of sawdust, warm wood and polishing oils almost overpowers the drains. Everything from tiny filigree boxes to art deco inspired desks is crying out for you to caress it - to run your hands over the golden wood and perfect joinery and imagine what family treasures are equal to storage in ...