I got out of the van, grabbed my backpacks, and said good-bye to the driver. The bus station wasn’t well marked, but there were enough people moving around to be sure that the building in front of me was what I was looking for. The first thing I did was to find a place to sit down and the second thing was to figure out the system. It seems that every country/city has its own system for buses (and other forms of travel) and until you do it once you never know if you’re actually going to get where you need to. It’s for that reason that I feel that it’s always a good idea to spend about ten minutes just watching people. While I was sitting there I noticed another backpacker getting out of a taxi and heading in, and not too much time later I noticed him again without his pack. So I asked him where he put his pack, and promptly followed his lead. I later ran into him again and found out that he is from Germany and as luck would have it, was heading to Essaouira as well, it even went as far as our assigned seats were together. It’s always nice to have someone to talk to on a journey, and he was talkative and was an experienced traveller.

After four hours and a good conversation we arrived at Essaouira. Now to be honest, I’d never heard of this city or village before and I had no idea what to expect when I arrived, but when I did it was a nice surprise. It has some of the bad things that tourist”y” places have, like dozens of people bugging you for hotel rooms, and taxi drivers insisting that you ride with them, but it also had a charm about it. It was dirty, but comfortable, crowded, but simple. Like I said there is/was a charm to it.

The area that I’m staying in is part of an old fort I think, it’s got high wall surrounding it, which are most notable on the ocean side of the souk. The walls are something like thirty feet high, and in some areas the ocean breaks right on the wall, other areas, there are rocks that break the water. It makes for a very picturesque image. I took so many pictures of waves and boats, and walls, that I’m going to have a very hard time deciding which to add to the blog. I hung out on some of the rocks outside of a retaining wall for about 90 minutes to watch the sun go down, and then headed for cover from the wind. Oh, I didn’t mention the wind… very windy here… very, very, windy here.