Oualidia, Morocco

We're in the fishing village of Oualidia, population 4,000. It's on a beautiful little lagoon, which feeds the neighbouring oyster farms. Yesterday the village and beach were bustling, filled with locals on weekend trips. Today it's much quieter, although very windy and not very comfortable beach weather.

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Dinner in Casablanca was excellent. I had lamb tanjine, and Heather had the seven-vegetable couscous (a Casablanca specialty). The Lonely Planet describes couscous as "you know the yellow stuff that comes in a box that you boil for 3 minutes and let sit? well that's not couscous". And they're right. The stuff we make at home nowhere resembles how good the couscous is here. It's light, fluffy, tasty... We shared a 50cl bottle of Moroccan wine (also quite good), and tried a Flag beer (not so good - reminded me of Bud Light).

The next morning we caught a CTM bus (the national bus company) to Oualidia. (The "Ou" is a "w", as in the french "Oui"). The CTM buses are very efficient, with computerized seat reservations and tagged luggage. No worries about my pack getting stolen here. I slept for most of the trip, still a bit jet-lagged.

Oualidia is small enough that it doesn't warrant a map in the Lonely Planet. We walked down the road leading to the beach, and found the hotel. Heather had called the day before to reserve a room at the Hotel L'Initiale. It's a quaint little place with six rooms, about 50m from the beach, for 400Dh.

We explored around the beach and the village. We had dinner at the restaurant in our hotel, but we were still hungry, so went to another place that was filled with locals. This place was much better, (they even gave us a half-dozen oysters on the house!) We both liked the oysters here in Oualidia, very distinctive from other places.

A very common sight here is people sitting in cafès having a mint tea. We have had a few so far, although I can't pace my sipping and usually end up drinking half of Heather's as well. The mint tea is some sort of tea leaf, with a lot of mint leaves and some sweetener (maybe honey). It's really good.

Today for lunch we had sardines freshly-caught from the ocean and grilled streetside, with artisan bread. It was very tasty. We had to be shown how to eat the sardines, first peeling away the skin, and then creating a sardine sandwich. Mmmm good. Very cheap too -- about 30Dh for the two of us.