Tickets and Tours for Morocco Experiences

Essaouira is the standard coastal day out from Marrakesh. It is a hundred and seventy-five kilometres, about three hours each way. The road is fast and dull rather than mountainous.

Do the arithmetic before booking. Six hours in the car buys four or five on the coast, and the group coaches turn round about five. That gets the medina, the port and lunch, but not the sunset.

What the road does

The drive west has a fixed rhythm, and one part of it is theatre.

• Argan cooperative. A women's collective on the plain, cracking nuts by hand. The pressing is real; the shop is the point.
• Goats in trees. Argan goats do climb, on their own, out in the hills. The ones arranged in roadside trees here are put there for the camera.
• Wind on the ridge. Turbine rows above the last valley, then argan scrub, then the sea all at once.

The group clock against a private car

How you travel changes the day more than what you see. A shared minibus is cheap and keeps one clock. A private car costs more per head and buys the hours.

Some drivers will take you one way, and that is the option people wish they had taken. Essaouira empties when the day trippers go. Buses run back in the morning.

Practical

• What to wear. The coast runs ten to fifteen degrees cooler than Marrakesh, with wind on top. People leave in shorts and buy a jumper on the ramparts.
• Timing. Departures are between seven and eight, and you are back in Marrakesh around nine at night.
• Lunch. Rarely included, and the port grills are what makes groups run late.
• The goat stop. A few dirhams a photograph, and nobody minds if you stay in the car.
• Weather. This is the trip that survives a bad forecast. Rain makes it grey, where mountain days get cancelled.