Christmas in Essaouira

We decided to take a day trip to the lovely seaside town, Essaouira on Christmas day.
I'd been really obsessing about getting "pure" Argan oil to bring back and read Essaouria was the place. My husband, focusing on the history side of things, wanted to see the place that Jimi Hendricks supposedly wrote  "Castles in the Sand. (Turns out he didn't write it there, only visited afterward, but oh well!)
The lovely employ-ess at Riad Kaiss booked a driver for us the night before, and at 9 the next mornig we were on our way.  The trip was about 3- 4 hours from Marrakech by car. That was a surprise to us given the long day we had hoped to spend by the sea.
For whatever reason, I took "driver' to mean that he would be getting us there and back and we were pretty much on our own in the way of exploring. Not so. Our driver was a part of a tour company so instead of getting us point to point we were part of an itinerary not our own. Grrrrr. I try not to do guided tours or overtly touristy things when I travel so this really bummed me out.
 I noticed about 3 hours in that maybe he had a plan beyond just getting us there, when I inquired about stopping at one of the first shoddy looking Argan Co-op's along the way and was told, "There is a good one ahead. I take you to." My suspicion was solidified when we arrived at a women's Argan cooperative called Beladi.  Not that it wasn't a great experience but this place compared to the others was very clearly geared toward tourists.
When you first walk in, they have a room you are first instructed to see, activities narrated by a Moroccan woman, modernly dressed. There are 6 to 8 women seated on the floor engaged in various stages of argan oil making. She walks us quickly through each process as though reading from a card.
First the nut is cracked and husked. - the nut goes to the next woman for another cracking and the husks get used for fire.
Second the nut is ground to an almond paste in a stone grinder/mortar type thing and you can see the oil running off into another stone pan.
After that, the paste leftover from the first round of grinding gets squeezed again under a stone to extract every last drop of oil. The gummy looking nut paste leftover is fed to the animals.  Nothing goes to waste in this process.
The last step is the oil itself  used for cooking and eating. I guess the step after that would be the purfication process to make it into cosmetic grade, but that wasn't part of the tour.

I was lucky to find this image of Beladi from the website  edenallure.com because didn't take any pictures there.

We are then guided into a room filled with products, bottled and wrapped professionally. Quite a step from the rudimentary process in the other room. I don't know what I was expecting but I wanted it to be in the Moroccan version of old jam jars with a ribbon or something really homemade with no traces of factory life. But I digress. The oils are beautiful and they let us taste their honey, argan oil for cooking and Amlou- an almond butter made from argan, almonds and local honey-YUM!

I load up a basket to the brim, the prices not cheap and in Euros, so I know now this place is totally geared for the tourists but the quality is still better than the Argan in the souks. Fortunately or unfortunately, depends which one of us you ask, their credit card machine was down so I had to seriously edit my basket. Wah.

We get back in the car and drive the last 20-40? minutes into Essaouira. First stop food. We skipped breakfast thinking it'd be a much shorter ride. Now hip to the fact we are on a tour I ask if the restaurant is very touristy and he says, "No no, it's very authentic." We pull up to Cafe Fantasia a place on the beach with a great view of the water.

Gaining my excitement again, we head toward the back deck and are greeted by a SEA of sun burnt white faces mowing down on their food. Indoors, a group of Moroccan tour guides are sitting and eating what I believe is a free lunch in turn for business. Which is great for them, but I'm fuming. And hungry and cranky. It's Christmas and I'm trying not to be unpleasant.  Yea, I am a tourist too, but I'm not sun burnt and I just want a low profile experience. Maybe I am that ahole tourist that believes they blend. Either way we were there for lunch and had a great sunny table and a view of the sea. We  had gotten this idea in our heads that we would get sardines stuffed with garlic, coriander and other spices at the fish stalls, like it had said in some tour book we saw in the hotel. Seeing french fries was not part o the plan, and was a bit of a let down. We wanted spice! We wanted flava!

Meow.
The food's not great or good, but it gets us back to feeling normal again. We feed the pregnant cat leftover calamari (without the breading)while we wait for the check. 

Good news is, we are on our own for 2 whole hours to explore the medina.

It's much different from Marrakech and you get the feeling right away that it's a pretty solid hippie, surfer spot. It puts us in a good mood to walk around and for sure it feels really 60's 70's.
In some of the shops the treasures are dusty or worn from years in the sun, but that adds to the charm and the feeling of the place. We wander aimless to pass the hours. From the streets to an old fortress we enjoy every minute and agree to come back again, without a guide, and for more than half a day

                      

Portuguese Fort

With the sun getting lower in the sky we knew it was time to head back to meet our guide.
We were hungry and still hadn't made it to the recommended seaside fish stalls.
They were still open when we got there, and we decided on the Sardines as our fish of choice. This was the first place we got a little bit of shade for being tourists unwilling to spend massive amounts of "euro" on fish. It was minor compared to what we would experience later in Fes and Tangier, people demanding things in your currency and then being not so nice about it when you don't comply.  
We asked for a 2 sardines each and most places scoffed at us. Finally with the help of our guide, we found a place that would serve us what we wanted.
A "few" sardines.

Having a pretty solid fear of getting a fish bone stuck in my throat ( and having had a dream about it the night before)  I think I adapted well to the pinch, pull, pick method I was taught to eat these babies.  Once assured, multiple times, that I would not eat a bone, I really enjoyed the experience. They were very tasty. Especially with the red onion, lemon and tomato.
We got back in the car with our fishy hands and headed to one last obligatory tour stop.
La Rochelle de Thuya is a local workshop where they make hand carved boxes, lamps, tables, soccer balls etc from the Thuya wood. You see these kinds of boxes/items all over the souks, and I was told that Essaouira is where the handicraft came from.  Having no intention of buying anything,  our extra bag already full or rugs and treasure,  we looked around and admired some of the beautiful work done by these artisans. They even showed us the process of how they do their inlaying using the different parts of the tree to create different wood patterns. Bark, vs root etc. Very nice.

A view from the upstairs window at La Rochelle De Thuya 

After that, we were on our way back to the hotel.  Sigh.
All in all, being on a tour wasn't so miserable as it was just difficult not to have the autonomy we are used to while exploring new places.
I wouldn't have wanted to do that long drive on our own, driving is straight CRAZY in Morocco, but it's a very small town so a guide isn't needed to get around or see the sights. There's plenty of Argan from co-ops being sold right in the medina, but seeing it first hand was very cool. I will give him that. :)

                                                                  Views from the car.

The skies are always filled with story book puffy clouds.

Housing developments being built.