Riad Zahra Mogador Essaouira

O.k. perhaps I best explain...

Coming up for air here after many adventures all across Morocco. Am presently in Essaouira - a most lovely seaside town along the Atlantic coast, about 3 hrs. southwest of Marrakech.

The techno explaination:

I arrived yesterday (well actually "today" as it's now Oct. 4, but I shall leave the date above as that's when I first arrived) and whilst ...

I’d always had this romantic notion of riding a horse along a deserted beach with the wind blowing through my hair – well it sure was windy, but it wasn’t quite as romantic in reality due to having an extremely sore bum!! I won’t sit down for a week I reckon!! Yep, another dream was realised today.

At breakfast we mentioned to the owner of the riad we are staying in that we wanted to go horse riding – 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.

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 ...

Hotel Palais Le'Heure Bleue







Imagine waking up to the sun peeking in through your suite window.

Just enough to summon you to the balcony to take in the marvelous views of Morrocco
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The sea, the port and the towns that await you...


This could be the start of your day when you stay at the Heure Bleue Palais
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Located in ...

... 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 ...

... heirloom itself. In the late afternoon the seagulls start an exodus down to the port. The walled moorings are grid-locked with azure wooden dinghies bringing home whatever came up in the nets today. Larger trawlers bring in the sardines. Sometimes you see a woman crouched over her husband's catch selling independently to hard haggling, knowledgeable fishwives. More often you buy your congor eel, moray, sea bass, bream, stingray, scampi, sea urchins ...