The London/Marrakech Express, Part Five

It's dawn in Marrakech. Thanks to jetlag, I awaken early and creep up to the hotel roof to see the sun make its first appearance over the ancient medina.

(Marrakech and Atlas Mountains)

Breakfast is a quick affair as we have hired a car and driver for the day to take us on a Moroccan road trip to Essaouira, a coastal town three hours west of Marrakech.

Within minutes, we are out of the city...

...and speeding headlong into the sheltering sky.

We're in the middle of nowhere and our senses thrill to it. After 36 hours of exotic chaos, the stillness is both deafening and strangely intimate. We stare out the window at the unfamiliar landscape and even Luca is silent for once.

Then suddenly I spot something that makes me blink once, then twice. Have we stumbled into a Dr. Seuss book?

A goat in a tree?

How can that be?

In fact, there are three of them, perched on the highest branches of a scraggy-looking tree. Our driver explains the goats have climbed it to eat the argan berries, which are similar to olives.

After eating them, they excrete the nuts inside which are then collected and ground up to make the region's argan oil, famed for its culinary uses and anti-aging properties.

When we pass a cooperative selling argan products a little while later, I tell Piero we have to stop.

Him: Really? You want to stop again?

Me: Yes! How many times are we going to get the chance to buy something excreted from a goat? I'll use it on my skin and you can use it in all the tagines you're going to make.

Luca: That's disgusting. I am not eating it.

Inside, local women sit on the floor shelling, cracking and grinding the nuts into a fine paste.

It does not look like an easy job.

Piero purchases a bottle of the nutty-tasting oil and I buy some skin elixir from this lovely woman. She swears it will make my skin "go backwards in time." (Should this happen, I promise to let you know.)

By now, we are getting so close to Essaouira that we can smell the sea air.

The charming white-washed buildings are a stark difference from the rose-colored walls of Marrakech and there is a palpable hippie vibe here. We walk through the main square...

...past the 18th century fortifications...

...and down to the harbour. The day's catch has just come in.

It is all I can do to drag Piero away from these freshly-caught sardines slathered in rock salt.

I think this fisherman is very "Sartorialist."

We head into the walled medina and wander through the narrow streets. We move slowly in the hot sun past unblinking cats and dusty wares and faded doors that hint at a colorful past...

...past children playing soccer with a dented basketball...

...past regal towers of cumin, coriander, ginger and turmeric...

...past meat and toys, hanging from shared hooks.

We look. We listen. We take it all in.

We don't shop. We watch others shop.

For lunch, we choose one of the countless fish stalls that line the harbor.

After reverent deliberation, Piero makes his selection and within minutes...

...it's returned to us. We try to sear the memory of every delicious bite into our consciousness for retrieval at a later date.

By now, it's late afternoon. We take a walk up to the old fortress...

...and embrace the stillness one last time. The sun is sinking in the sky and it's time to drive back to Marrakech.

As I gaze out at across the endless Atlantic, I try to remember a famous passage from "The Sheltering Sky" but only succeed in summoning the emotion of it, not the words.

Later, back at the hotel, I find the book in the upstairs library.

"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

-- Paul Bowles, "The Sheltering Sky"