I give up trying to correctly spell the name of this place. I mean, transliteration is tough enough as it is; even worse trying to transliterate it all into French. I’ll have to wait till I get back to see what Hans says. As best as this tells me, it should, in English, be aṣ-ṣūwairah, but that’s assuming I’ve put the shaddas and the tashkil in the right places and interpreted the dipthongs correctly… I give up. No more about this city.
Here are some pictures:
The city at night:
When we woke up the next morning, we saw the view from our balcony.
Just in case we got attacked:
We walked down to the beach. This one wasn’t as crowded, but it was still fairly active. The water was pretty cold, but it was refreshing.
We walked back through the city, found the alcohol shop to buy a few beers and bottles of wine for the apartment. On the way back, as we snaked through the old city, we saw a Mexican restaurant. This was a big deal for Chris, who after a year in Mauritania is longing for a burrito from the cosmic cantina.
Before we went to dinner, we decided to walk down by the docks. It’s pretty interesting and remarkable that an amazing city like Essauoaria is still an active fishing port and hasn’t been completely overrun by tourists. The fishing boats lined up made for a good picture. So good, in fact, that I decided I’d try to get down closer for a better look. There was a ramp down to the water’s edge, so I took it. At the bottom, years of algae, seaweed, and fishguts had combined to make a pretty slippery paste. I started sliding down, but figured it was only a few more feet until it leveled out and I’d be fine. Well, just then my feet slip out from under me and I go cascading down the ramp. I had managed to fall on the arm that wasn’t holding the camera, which was lucky (though the case did get really dirty). I went ahead and snapped the picture, then tried to figure out exactly how I was going to get back up the ramp. I guess it was a combination of bouldering and sheer luck that I managed to get up and find the Pauls so I could get a room key. If walking through a foreign city covered in fishguts isn’t a solution to embarrassment, I don’t know what is. I got back to the apartment and used probably an entire cornfield worth of ethanol to disinfect the cuts and scrapes I got when I fell.
The picture that cost me so dearly:
That night we had dinner in the old Jewish quarter at a great restaurant where we got our own private dining room on the courtyard.
The next morning, John, Robbie, Chris and I took a drive down the coast to see if we could find any good surfing spots. Apparently, the entire year is great for surfing in Morocco… except July. We did see a wind farm and found a sufers cafe. The wait was epic, but the food was great. We saw a sign for a beach, only 12km away. We got on the single track rocky road, and realized that it would take us an hour to get there. We turned around and headed back.
Chris wanted to eat at the Mexican place we had seen. We wound our way through the city trying to find it… and of course it was closed. We ended up eating at a restaurant that it’s promoter insisted had “democratic prices.” I don’t know what that means. But the food wasn’t great.