Let’s get a few things out of the way: Paul McCartney is alive, Elvis is dead and Jimi Hendrix didn’t write Castles in the Sand in Essaouira, Morocco, where he also is reputed to have lived for several months and fathered a bunch of little Jimis along the way.
The facts are these:
1) He stayed for two days and didn’t even bring his guitar;
2) A cool place like Essaouira shouldn’t need myths about rock gods to attract tourists.
As a lifelong New Englander and a bit of a homebody, Morocco was not on my list of possible vacation destinations until my longtime friend Sonia moved there last fall on a Fulbright scholarship and insisted I pay a visit. So in mid-March, I hopped on a plane and spent 11 days in Morocco, including five in Essaouira, a place I was unaware of until Sonia mentioned it about a week before takeoff.
Essaouira, like many Moroccan cities, features a medina, or “old city,” with ancient buildings crammed together like people in subways and peddlers selling everything from fresh fruits and veggies to cheap knock-off Yankees hats (a popular Moroccan fashion statement).
Following an eight-hour combined bus-train ride from Rabat, the capital, our tired, cranky, starving selves entered the Essaouiran medina to search for our hotel, Dar Afram, and promptly got lost. Medinas are like super-sized mazes: There are plenty of twists and turns and only a few exits. We had to call the hotel and have one of the proprietors hunt us down.
We didn’t stay cranky and hungry for long. Essaouira is very laid-back, which is quite a contrast for someone used to New England’s stuffiness. And no place better epitomized that than Dar Afram, owned by a folk band named Afram. (Dar means “place” or “place of” in much of North Africa.)
Our mornings consisted of breakfast on the roof overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and our evenings consisted of acoustic mini-concerts from the Afram members while we sat around a room, sipped on wine and compared notes with fellow tourists (“So what’s Marrakech like?” “Oh, you’re attending a cooking class?”). Several weeks later, I still can’t get their songs out of my head.
I can’t get the taste of the food out of my mouth, either. To be honest, I can’t tell you the names of the meals I ate, except the chicken pastilla (a mix of chicken, veggies, spices and a thin crust, also available with pigeons). Moroccan cooking, especially when fish and chicken are the main dishes, is amazing. It made me think of that line in The Natural when Roy Hobbs is having one of his first meals in the big leagues, but doesn’t know the name of the dish; a coach tells him “You can’t spell it, but it eats pretty good, don’t it?”
One note: Bread is served with everything in Morocco — breakfast, lunch and dinner. You eat it with your meal, then wipe your plate clean with it. I can honestly say I won’t eat as muchbread the rest of the year as I ate in my week-and-a-half overseas.
Other differences in eating customs took me by surprise. In America, you come, you eat, you get your check and you leave. In Morocco, where extended conversation is a big part of the dining experience, you’re not getting a check unless you get the waitstaff’s attention. I can imagine a Moroccan family coming to an American restaurant and wondering why they’re getting their check so quickly. They’re just settling in, right? In Rabat, I asked for a check and got another beer instead. Of course, my inability to speak French might have had something to do with that.
Perhaps our most entertaining meal in Essaouira came following a walk along the beach. As I imagine is the case in other nations, there are always people trying to hustle you into buying something, anything. It’s the one part of Essaouira that’s not laid-back. They see a tourist and dollar signs (or in Morocco, dirham signs) light up in their eyes. In this case, we were walking along a small string of beachside outdoor eateries, where staffers were shoving menus in our faces and exhorting us to take a seat. We were hungry after several hours of walking on the beach, so we caved in.
But here’s the cool part: We got to pick out the actual fish (from a cart) we wanted to eat. We chose a sole, I believe. We were hustled to a table with several strangers, a basket of bread was tossed in front of us and we feasted away on fresh, fried fish. Then, almost as quickly as we were hustled in, we were hustled out and back on to the beach. It was like an assembly line, only with great food.
The atmosphere was a little quieter when we went on a group hike in a section called Tifaouine, where we experienced green valleys, dry desert, a pristine beach, an ocean and rocky formations — all in the span of a few miles.
It was great to experience a natural habitat so completely different from New England’s pine trees and crows. We saw camels contentedly chewing on tree leaves (for 20 bucks, or 200 dirhams, I got to ride one a few days earlier), and we made our way through hundreds of argan trees, which produce the fruit needed for argan oil, used in Moroccan food.
We saw plenty of farmland, and Sonia explained to me that most of the farmers live on only 20-30 dirhams a day, about the cost of a pack of baseball cards. Amid the modest homes, the last things I expected to see were round, rusted satellite dishes as the farmers worked the land and tended to their sheep.
Afterward, we went to one of these houses and ate a traditional Moroccan meal, where I thought the appetizer was the main course, only to be surprised when an even bigger entree (chicken and veggies) arrived. Moroccan meals often flow that way, Sonia explained.
Morocco was a great place to spend some time, forget about life and expand my horizons.
But the best part? No one there heard or cared about anyone named Bernie, Hillary or Donald. And that’s what a vacation is all about.
Dave Bailey is a night editor on the sports desk. He can be reached at dbailey@vnews.com or 603-727-3218.