Morocco Malta and the Med: Casablanca and El Jadida
I can’t be staying in bed when we are coming into port in a new city.
This was seriously disturbing.
That mist looks sulfuric!
We are warned that Casablanca is an industrial port. No kidding!
Quick breakfast and we are off to El Jadida, an old Portuguese fortress city. We were actually here ten years ago on our very first cruise, The Moors in Spain and Morocco. We really love Morocco. One year we came here at Christmas, which was also Ramadan, rented a car and drove all around Morocco with our son. We had such a great time.
Our guide tells us this area near El Jadida is famous for raising horses for racing and showing.
Me and my stone walls!
Getting close to El Jadida:
An old Portuguese Catholic Church in El Jadida. The people around Casablanca make it a point to discuss frequently how tolerant the area is, with Jewish and Christian populations as well as Muslim and Berber. Our guide was proudly Berber.
We had been warned that the beautiful old Portuguese Cisterns were closed for restoration, so the photo below is the exterior only, but I have a treat for you. Below the shot of the exterior is a photo of the interior I took ten years ago. I still love to look at it. The cisterns are so beautiful as well as functional.
I don’t consider this cheating; I consider it . . . um . . . illustrating. . . or embellishing to show you what you might see when you go to El Jadida.
Below are Moroccan silk weavings.
I believe this is the old Jewish bakery.
When you read old histories or bible stories about prisoners being cast into a well, it could look a lot like this:
This picture below is hilarious because I am wearing an expensive pair of shoes that I find clunky. The trip description said it was challenging, with uneven hikes, rocks, and hills. It was a very mild hike; I could have worn my sandals.
My husband took this photo below; he loved the contrast of the drawing of the cisterns and the laundry hung to dry over the cisterns.
It’s going to be a couple hours ride back to the ship, but the guide has a treat for us – “Snacks” at a local restaurant, part of the tour, no extra charge. The small restaurant was just big enough to hold all of us, had a nice clean restroom and place to wash up, and served these delicious sandwiches, followed by a selection of house baked Moroccan cookies, and Turkish coffee or Mint Tea. The owner and his wife were so hospitable. They made us feel like very special guests. It really was a treat!
As we sail away from Casablanca, that same ship continues to be surrounded with that yellow steamy cloud.
For us, we have seen everything we wanted to see. We think Cadiz and Malaga will be pretty tame after the excitement of Ajaccio, Malta, Tunis and Algiers. (We were wrong!)
El Jadida and Casablanca, Morocco
As we leave Marrakesh, I tell AdventureMan that we could easily drive here, and that gas prices are really good:
And AdventureMan reminds me that it is not the price per gallon, but the price per liter. Oh. That’s very different. The Moroccan countryside on our drive to El Jadida reminds me of Tunisia back in the late 1970’s when we lived there, full of little marabouts, or burial places of people who lived saintly lives. The guide explained if it is white, it is a man’s grave, if it has green or blue, it is a woman.
Market days along the route:
We reach El Jadida, where we are visiting an old Portuguese cistern. It turns out to be very beautiful. It also starts raining cats and dogs, making it very hard to take a good photo in any unsheltered place. The rain is really coming down! We are soaked!
Those are not blue skies; those are cloudy grey skies!
Light fixtures 🙂
The old ramparts of the Portuguese fort:
We stopped at a huge place where, once again, they were set up to serve groups. There must have been 500 – 600 people serving themselves. I saw ONE Moroccan dish. There were several Chinese dishes, an entire section of Italian entrees, all in all, a very bland selection of “international foods” which means you can find something to eat, but it won’t taste all that great. It is engineered to be nourishing and inoffensive. There were many many kinds of desserts, in tiny portions. This was a very not-special kind of place to eat.
The entry was built to be impressive:
We were very close to Casablanca, and made a trip along the coastline to see one of the largest mosques in the world, the Hassan II mosque.
We made a brief stop so everyone could photograph “Rick’s Cafe.” which never existed except in the movie, but now has a restaurant of that name, in Casablanca, and draws in a lot of people who saw the movie.
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