Goats in trees

A day at the beach.

How many diary entries begin with those simple five words? Ignoring Samuel Pepys who probably never went to the beach, of course.

And how many of those diary entries describe the simple pleasures of leaving behind the big city for the simple environs of surf, sea and sand?

If the big city is Marrakech, the simple delight becomes a massive dose of much needed R&R and if the beach is at Essaouira, the dose is delivered in spades.

Yes, today we took a tour out of the city and headed for the sea. However, things didn’t start off nearly as positive as they finished. There was a bit of a nervous start.

Our mini-bus was scheduled to turn up at 8am, right in front of the hotel, so we dutifully woke early and had breakfast, presenting ourselves, ready to travel, in front of the hotel doors at ten minutes to. By 8:30 we started getting a bit concerned that, perhaps we had fallen for the old con-the-simple-tourists-out-of-their-money trick.

I went back into the hotel and asked the guy at the reception whether he could help us. He took one look at our receipt and read out the tour company name with equal parts of venom and distaste at having the venom in his mouth in the first place. The hotel, you see, does it’s own tours. He threw the receipt back in my face. So, I asked him, you are not going to help me? He shook his head with a finality usually reserved for the jobless.

We next tried the public telephone standing outside the place where we originally purchased the tour (which was closed) but, rather than coins or credit cards, it only accepted telephone cards. A pity, I thought, that all of these people trying to sell us everything but telephone cards didn’t just change tack.

Interestingly, while we stood on the footpath debating the evils of Morocco, we were hailed by hundreds of passing taxis. Clearly taxis outnumber people in this city by about 15 to one so the driver hails the customer rather than the way things are supposed to be. Very weird and you end up constantly shaking your head at every passing car that begins to slow down and beep at you.

As the clock approached 9am, I’d had enough and decided to use my phone to call the agency guy (he’d helpfully written his name and number on the back of the receipt) who said he’d check and ring me back. Which, surprisingly, he did. He texted to say the van would be with us in ten minutes. Which it was.

There’d been some sort of silly mix-up and, basically, time is pretty elastic in Marrakech. 8am can easily mean 9am and all points in between. But it all turned out fine and we were soon on the bus heading out of town.

On our journey with us was a mother and son. She’d been to Marrakech before and, while hating it, had returned. We were shocked. With so many really lovely places in the world, it seemed rather odd to return to somewhere you disliked. Still, she does work in mental health, which may explain something.

Then, somewhere in the middle of nowhere where the road was almost empty, beautifully straight and with not a pot hole in sight, our driver was flagged down at a police checkpoint and fined for speeding. In order to try and show how much this was in the middle of nowhere, here’s a photo I took in front of the bus as we waited for the driver to return from his interrogation and torture.

It took a while (the driver was kicking and screaming his innocence all the way) but we soon headed off once more, driving noticably slower…for a little bit. And that’s when we saw the goats.

The guy sitting up front with the driver turned to us and explained that the area we were in was full of olives which stretched a goodly way across the known landscape and then, just around a bend, there were these goats in trees. Just standing on branches, munching on olives. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. They were perched, like big, four legged, clumsy birds.

The guy asked if we wanted to take a photo but we knew that the minute he stopped, the goatherds would be on us, demanding payment. While I’m sure snap happy Nicktor probably feels great loss at having not recorded this amazing sight, I like to think that it will forever remain a wonderful reminder of our holiday that only we can truly share.

It does beg the question though of how the goats managed to climb into the tree in the first place. The obvious answer is that they stood on a few olives and waited for them to grow but they weren’t there when we returned so, clearly, they do it every day.

And they were real goats and not the tiny dwarf goats we saw at the Surrey Show one year. Extraordinary.

Then, a mere 30 clicks from our destination (it was about 200km), the van pulls into an olive business. The guy with the driver told us there was a toilet, coffee and a place to buy everything we could possibly need that was made from olives. Nicktor took advantage of the toilet but, otherwise, we just waited for the driver to have a cup of coffee.

And then, as if by magic, another mini-van (bigger than the first) turned up with a bunch of Spanish tourists and we were swapped into that one. Anyway, to cut a long journey slightly shorter, we eventually made it to outside the city walls of Essaouira and told to meet back in the same place at 4pm.

Essaouira is a little bit like a Moroccan St Malo in that it is surrounded by battlements and is by the sea. It is nothing like St Malo in that everyone tries to sell you drugs. In fact, Nicktor has become quite terse in his dealings with locals and their offers of various things so that when a guy immediately approached him and asked if he’d like some hash cakes, he was close to growling when he declined. This didn’t stop the guy who merely offered marijuana cakes as an alternative.

In fact, it was the guys selling, what they called Space Cakes, every few feet that was the worst thing about Essaouira so I’m not going to mention them again because, overall we had a lovely day and I don’t want to spoil it by going on and on about the bad things.

One more thing, though, before I get on with the great time we had…Nicktor has started getting very annoyed with the guys who lurch out of their cafes and try and entice us into their establishments with all the charm of a falling piano. And so he’s made a pledge. We will only enter eating houses where we are not asked into. A simple ploy which paid great dividends as the day progressed.

But I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

Our first destination was the fishing port, littered with hundreds of blue boats all identical apart from their names which were identically painted on them with, it seemed, a toilet brush dipped in Tippex. And such a lovely array of fishing boats…I was in heaven. The big trawlers, sitting being preened and photographed, their work completed for the day. Some still returning from the sea, surfing in on the breaking waves of the small port. I really wanted everyone to feel the same joy that I did.

And then I saw it. One of them was for sale. I’m sure it would be a bargain. I didn’t enquire but have the phone number for when I get home. Perhaps the owner would sail it up to Chichester for me.

One careful owner

There followed an awful lot of photography which I wont bore you with and then a trip up to the battlements around a fort-like structure that overlooked the town. Although the weather was decidedly glum, I did manage to get a shot of the whole town with my phone.

Eventually, Nicktor tired of pressing the shutter button on his camera and we strolled into the market square for some lunch. Following our new edict, we sneered at everyone who begged us to enter and went straight into the first that didn’t. And I enjoyed a delicious plate of grilled sardines (both Nicktor and Mirinda – by text – said yuck) and Nicktor had a burger. All the food was ever so much nicer because we’d chosen to eat there without the slightest inducement.

After lunch we went for a stroll along yet more souks and asked many more times whether we wanted drugs or not and ended up on the sea wall by the beach. There was a football match on. Apparently there’s nearly always a football match on the beach. We sat and watched it, thoroughly enjoying the efforts of a group of young lads trying to beat the waves as their ball headed in the wrong direction.

They had some odd rules which we never did work out but, overall, it was a lot of fun and a very relaxing way to spend some time. There was also a couple of grown-up teams playing a little further up the beach who took such a long time taking various photos of themselves that we were surprised they actually started playing. They are part of a league which plays regularly on the beach.

But, all good things must come to an end and we soon wandered back to wait for the bus at the prearranged spot. Which he drove right passed and ended up across the road in a crowded carpark. Just to be awkward.

But just one final image of Essaouira. The clouds almost completely vanished in our last half an hour there (we visited for four hours) and I think this photo shows the place in a much more favourable light.

The only thing of note that happened on the way back to Marrakech was that the driver was booked for speeding. Different driver, different minibus, same result.

Marrakech was heaving when we reached it. To describe the utter mayhem on the road just up from the hotel is next to impossible. How no-one died is beyond me. I think Sunday night must be a big one in these parts because it felt a lot more crowded than it did last night.

It was, mostly, this that decided us to eat upstairs at the hotel. And, boy, am I glad we did. A real restaurant with delicious Moroccan food and, would you believe it, BEER. Okay, it was (obviously) lager but who’s going to complain about that, given our situation? Not us. We had two each. Oh, refreshing nectar of delicious hops, how could anyone not love you as we do?

And that was it…well, apart from the fact that as soon as we reached the hotel, we popped next door and booked another tour for Tuesday, this time to the south and, hopefully, a bit of desert.

As Nicktor would say, “Marvellous!”