I take liberties with Crosby, Stills & Nash. Instead of “Take the train from Casablanca going south,” I leave Marrakech upon the highways going North to Casablanca. It nears the end of my Moroccan tour and we leave the city of Marrakech in our rearview mirrors.
We close the door on our comfortable stay at Dar al Hossoun in Taroudant. Leaving the cats and peacock behind, we continue our progress westward.
For the past few months, I have followed an online Moroccan travel group in order to gather tips about travel within Morocco. Consistently, I see the same towns or regions mentioned: Essaouira is one.
I most often note reasons for their visits include spas, medina, and beach. I’m hoping there are other reasons to attract visitors.
Note: Spellcheck insists in correcting my spelling for this city. I struggle to convince that unknown entity to leave my spelling alone. I am constantly correcting spell-check. Essaouira suffers from this schizophrenic confusion. Forgive me if I haven’t caught all the erroneous spellcheck errors.
The city of Taroudant looks large and enticing. As we enter the city, I see miles of adobe walls enclosing the old Medina. The entire area looks relatively untouched by modern man. This is a good thing.
Fortified walls of Taroudant
People tell me that in these mountains, this city stands out as unique because the French usually built a newer city alongside the traditional one during their long colonial reign. In Taroudant, this was not the case. The city retains its traditional feel, the best of which is the historic, well-preserved red mud/straw walls surrounding the city.
Thomas Lawrence, soldier and archaeologist, served in Saudi Arabia during WWI as a liaison between the British government and the Arab tribes. Such reality never gets in the way of location shooting when it comes to movies. Those gorgeous desert vistas seen in the movie Lawrence of Arabia lay in Jordan and here in Morocco.
We visit the sand and village where filming occurred some 62 years ago. By now, I’m sure all the camels, like Lawrence, have gone to the big movie studio in the sky.
