Riad Lotus Marine Hotel Essaouira

... in that bitty "Title" box that travelpod offers. Thus... my "OMG...Ack!" above.

Whatever. What no doubt you're far more interested in is - whattheheck I've been up to this past week, yes?

Many, many adventures. A dizzying array of sights, sounds, people, experiences.

But perhaps I best rewind here and post a bit at the earlier dates at each location in Morocco.

Stay tuned...

... everyone, collect our luggage from the riad and walk to the bus stop.

We arrive back in Marrakech around 10pm – and are greeted by the usual crowd hassling you to offer you taxi services. We could barely get off the bus for people thrusting things at us and shouting for our attention. John is trying to get our bag and he engages in conversation with one of the taxi drivers, for some reason one of the other taxi drivers seems to think that John is his cusomter and ...

... two hours. When we arrived, it was such beautiful! We walked to the defensive fortress built right on the cliffs, there are many cannons which looks ahead on the ocean. The waves are crushing on the cliffs under the fortress... And the wind of course! It knocks you down as if you were a puppet... Incredible feelings... Then we went to the deep part of the fortress, to the town itself. We visited ...

... br>the family or couple on vacation. Offering a host of amenties, including wifi, DVD players, spa
and massage services, a restaurant and club style bar, and a roof top pool that gives you
access to a view of the city you couldn't find elsewhere. Take a stroll through the narrow streets
of the medina and visit the many soukses (market places) that fill every corner of them.
Hear the ...

... find them. Eventually we found them in a rooftop café (took us a while to find the entrance and climb the stairs to get up to them). Had a drink and watched the sun set, then we all went back to the same café Mike and I had eaten lunch at, to sit inside and have dinner (pasta for me, pizza again for Mike). Went for a walk with Aussie Mike (the others were heading to a club), then back to the hotel to bed.

... of Arabia, and lots of people would travel back home to their families, so they put an old rattling bus back on the road and it came just at the right time. There was one seat left and it was next to a middle aged woman in a long dress so I wasn't too sure if it would be ok for me to sit there or would I get thrown out of the bus after only 50 meters, but I guess I was tolerable to the community ...

... in abundance as we found out during our stroll around town. We were asked over and over if we wanted to buy hash, the dealers keen to make a sale. An old guy wearing one of the popular hooded dressing gown style jellaba suits asked Nadine if she wanted to buy opium. There were also loads of guys walking around with trays of innocent looking cookies that were actually Space Cakes (hash cookies). The beach is really not that pretty but there is good surf there. We ...

... Moroccan method of painting; 3) walking along the windy beach that stretched out in front of Essaouira. We would have taken a dip or sat on the beach except it all looked too cold; 4) wandering into the mellah, the Jewish district, where we witnessed a gripping titanic struggle between a snipping super aggressive runty dog and a hissing arched cat who soon lost interest and slowly sauntered off; 5) enjoying the street scenes-a big brother, no more ...

... is a different color palate than Marrakech-- where Marrakech is red and yellow and dust coloured, Essaouira is blue and white and sand coloured. It was a bit like the Greece portayed in the movie the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (no, I'm not ashamed of having seen it... with my mother...). Stray cats, all over, like Marrakech, but here you saw dogs, as well. Two kinds: a small kind, with long curved tails, and a medium/large kind, also with long ...

... through - probably knowing we'd never be able to retrace that exact route again - I'll settle for getting back to the hotel. The streets were often dark tunnels dotted with hole-in-the-wall cafés, cobblers, carpet sellers and soccer hoodlums in training. Everybody sluices down their doorsteps at least twice a day so the cobbles are always slick and pooled. People still walk to the bakers with their rising bread to have it baked before the heat ...