Essaouira

Essaouira is an old Portuguese trading post. Clouds push the sultriness down, intensified by the complete absence of wind. Anyone who says that the most important ingredient of 1001 Nights is heroes is a bulimic. The only important things are the stench and the scent of the sky. In the morning I wake up in a windowless 12m² six-bed room. When I return from the bathroom, I’m green with envy: I’ll never be able to stink like this on my own.

The roof terrace on the fourth floor offers a view of hundreds of courtyard houses. The outside, and especially the top, is pretty run-down, but the inside is whitewashed. Cats lie on piles of rubbish. The medina is an incredible labyrinth. I count 202 corners and find two right angles. Open manhole, deadly stench. Nana mint on the next corner, then a fish market and mountains of spices.

You don’t really need eyes here. But a scavenger hunt with smells would certainly be fun here: Turn left at Orangenduft, straight on to the fishy mould and then turn left at Curry. The pictures are not that great…the expected splendour of a great story is at best found under a thick pile of dirt. A German backpacker-Berber walks through the city with me and tries to convince me that there is such a thing as German humour.

The beach is full of footballers and overpriced rental quads. Bodies of surfers lie bored in the doldrums in front of Club Mistral. The wind forecast for the whole of next week is more than poor. I’m thinking about travelling to the Sahara. The only problem is that even Morocco’s 10 x 20 km Sahara exclave is a whopping 750 kilometres away on the border with Algeria. Dakhla is 1200 kilometres to the south. Why do you always have to move forward so much when travelling?

After all, everyone in the hostel is sitting quite still. At least mentally, not in terms of the noise level. The Brits are playing drinking games, the Australians are smoking weed, the barman has a serious latent penchant for reggae music and the intellectual elite are chatting at breathtaking speed about the pros and cons of all the places they might visit. They’ve hung Bob Marley from the ceiling and the bumblebees are buzzing in my arse to stupid, run-of-the-mill hip hop.