I have been loving Tamraght! This small, hillside surfing village has dirt roads and is about three hours south of Essaouira. My hostel is very small and quiet with the ocean in front and endless mountains out the back. I was offered a ride here some days ago from two young German friends that I met at the Essaouira hostel who had rented a car and were heading in this direction. It was a bonus.

The weather here ranges from 8 – 12 degrees at night and 17 – 21 degrees in the day and is always sunny. I have been spending my time writing and reading in the evenings, with lots of hiking in the day.

I set off to find some castle ruins that I had spotted (all the way up) in the distance on a previous hike. After two hours of up, and more up, I (literally) stumbled on them.

When there is no known (at least to me) history of a castle I always wonder who lived there and built it. Did they stop at the highest point in the land, puff out their chest, plant their staff, and say, “Here I will build my castle! Start gathering rocks!”

I followed the wrong goat track back down and ended up in the village next to mine (they are scattered everywhere and all look the same) I had taken pictures giving myself a digital trail of bread crumbs to find my hostel once back, but that didn’t help me in the wrong village. I wasn’t worried about actually being lost. I could always see the ocean and from there, I knew exactly where I was.

For the first time on this trip I spent a couple of hours just sitting on the beach. It was another world. Tourists were strolling or sunbathing and surfers were surfing. I watched a group of young people in a surf lesson simulating surfing on dry ground. The inner dialogue between my ego and my alter ego went something like this –

“Such beautiful young people. Not a stretch mark to be seen. I should try surfing! It looks like so much fun. I think I will ….. Are you on crack?! Look how fast they leap up on their board from lying flat. You couldn’t get up that fast if a camel was running you down. Have you forgotten that you took another tumble because your ankle turned on a tiny little ledge on the road? You think you could balance on a surf board, with waves?! You can’t balance standing on solid ground….. But it looks so fun. Maybe I could do it. At least I could tr…

Suddenly, not quite in time, I noticed the surf racing up to overtake me where I’d planted myself. I grabbed my little bag with my phone, money and passport and moved as fast as I could. But I was stiff and slow because I’d been stationary for half an hour, so my joints didn’t work right. Everything got soaked. I just managed to save my shoe and my skirt, which were both floating out to sea. With my sodden and sandy belongings I positioned myself further up the sand. Soon my back was sore and it was time to move on.

Tamraght is definitely a surfers paradise and I will never surf. But the mountains behind it are a walkers paradise and I can still walk. Damn straight! Well…not always straight.

It was located in a large building with the ladies entrance on the right and the mens on the left. I walked in one of the ladies’ doors to see a small group of local women sitting on the floor in a circle with a big bowl of veggies, chicken and couscous in the middle. They were having lunch, traditional bread in their hands where we would have a fork, all digging in. Without question, they immediately invited me to join, so naturally I did. Expecting a hammam, I was a little confused but loved the random wonderfulness of it. And the food was as delicious as I remembered.

Forty-five years ago I spent a year and a half on my bicycle riding through Europe and North Africa with my first husband. In Tunisia we biked across the Atlas Mountains down into the Sahara Desert. It was hell and gone off the beaten track and we were often invited in for food. The veggie, chicken, couscous dish was the staple and I loved it. It was then that I was also invited for my first hammam.

In a nutshell, a hammam is a communal bath house involving sweat, hot water, soap, and a scrub. It was a small village in the mountains; the tiny cement building had a large wood furnace in the centre, surrounded by a circular half high cement wall with bench’s built into it, and a water cistern. It was me and all the village women, young and old. They stoked up the fire hot enough to make a sauna, took off their burka’s, soaped up their bodies and scrubbed each other down, including me. Then they poured pails of hot water all over each other. I remember tightly packed bodies, a lot of laughing, much raucously spoken Arabic (no one spoke English) and a strong sense of caring. It was a memorable and impactful experience for 20-year old me.

Anyway…back to the present. Once we were finished lunch one of the ladies led me out of the room and into the correct door for the hammam. Ahhh…got it!

It was essentially the same process as the first time but with much more finesse, style, comfort and modern facilities. I was led to a large, warm, clean, circular tiled room with a central platform and eight marble table slabs coming out from the wall by a smiling young woman who spoke no English. There were five or six local women there and two pubescent girls. Everybody was naked as a newborn and in some stage of the progression. There were no barriers or towels and I admired how comfortable they were in their nakedness among the sisterhood. The sight of an wizened old grandmother sitting and brushing her spry young granddaughters newly washed hair was so tender and beautiful it pierced me to my core. It was all very ‘just another weekly hammam’ for them. But for me, it was an intimate blending into another culture.

Body positivity is an ongoing work-in-progress for me and when I was told to undress I was initially self-conscious. But of course no one was remotely interested in me and I decided to let my body image dysfunctions drain out with the hammam water. Buck naked, in all my jiggly fish belly white glory, I was seated on a marble block (close to the grandmother and her granddaughter) where my attendant soaped me up all over with the local soft black olive soap. Again, it took some energy for me to relax with being attended to in that way… but while in Rome… I was then placed in a marbled steam room for about 10 minutes before she led me to one of the slabs and rinsed me off with pails of comfortably hot water. It was so slippery I was afraid I would shoot right off (I didn’t). Did she like her job I wondered. Was it interesting? What was going through her mind right then? (probably what was for dinner). I quieted my inner dialogue and laid on the marble slab. She proceeded to vigorously scrub every inch of my increasingly relaxed body with an exfoliating glove and some kind of paste. She washed and conditioned my hair and then more rinsing. The finale was a brisk, energetic 10 minute all over massage with a scented oil. The whole process took about 45 minutes.

I imagined Arabic women in their burkas to be more body inhibited than we are (and by that I mean me) in our culture, but that was not the case. They were relaxed and comfortable. And once I decided to lean into it, the experience was wonderful, invigorating and liberating.

I only stayed for a couple of days in Marrakech. My plan was to head into the high Atlas Mountains from there but decided instead to head for the warmth to rest up. My ankle and knee were fine but my hip and elbow needed a little more time.

For the last few days I have been staying at the Essaouira Beach Hostel. It is big, but well run and spacious. And their rooftop patio facing the sea and complimentary breakfast are unparalleled. Essaouira (pronounced wasira) is an unpretentious town with a stunning coastline, no resorts, nice people and good food. Many people here speak French, so in the markets I end up speaking an odd pigeon language intermingling high school French, duolingo Spanish, and English, said with a French accent (in case people might understand me better). Nobody understands. Think Joey on ‘Friends’ trying to speak French. I probably sound like that. So I just smile and say Salam.

I met some lovely young people and we wandered the market together for a day. We bought fish and vegetables and all cooked a delicious dinner together.

The ferry from Spain to Morocco left early in the morning and was uneventful until we docked and I tried to get off. After much running up and down the steep steel stairs connecting the decks I found out that, as a walk-on, I could only disembark from the bowel of the boat along with the transport trucks.

The other two walk-ons were Moroccan men who were already waiting there. They seemed nice and one spoke a little English. We all agreed to share a taxi, which was fortuitous as it was the only way to get the 50 kilometers from Tangier med to Tangier town. As we exited, I was stopped in my tracks by a ferryman. It seemed I didn’t have the right stamp in my passport and he wouldn’t let me off the ship. I ran back up the five flights of stairs to find the steward. He informed me that the border policeman had already left the ship but he was kind and called him; then he told me to hurry down and go to the border shuttle bus – the policeman would wait for me there. I ran back down as fast as I could. But the grunty ferryman who was letting the trucks off didn’t speak English and didn’t understand. He still wouldn’t let me off. I took a big breath, raced back up the five flights of stairs to find the steward again. I could barely gasp out an explanation. The steward came down and escorted me off. He was kind, but he also may have been sincerely afraid that I was going to stroke out on his boat. I staggered to the shuttle bus to find the border policeman and the two other Moroccan men happily chatting away. They had waited for me, even negotiating a local price for the taxi ride. Which was awesome! And all was well.

I got dropped at the train station in Tangier town where I bought a ticket to Marrakech. My assigned seat was beside a lovely family who didn’t speak English but we settled ourselves in, exchanged pleasantries and knew we were both going to Marrakech. Suddenly they were shaking me saying we had to get off. I had dozed off. Time to get off!? We were only a few hours in on a five and a half hour ride! But apparently my Arabic ticket said we needed to change trains in Casablanca. Again, lucky they were watching out for me!

They indicated much haste was required, so I threw on my shoes, quickly gathered my stuff and raced after them through the busy terminal. I am a stickler about tying my shoelaces as I am always afraid I will trip, but with the rush, you guessed it, I didn’t lace up. On the escalator my luck went a bit sideways. My shoelace got caught at the top and sucked in. I was moving fast and as I stepped off my upper half literally went airborne like some comic reel and I hit the marble floor hard. Sprawled flat, I just barely got my shoelace pulled out in time. The escalator almost swallowed my shoe with my foot with it. My family stayed with me, helped me up, and we all managed to just barely catch the train. Again, lucky…sort of. I’ll focus on the lucky part.

I arrived in Marrakech around 9pm. My elbow was swollen and crazy painful, my head and hip were throbbing and my knee and ankle were distinctly unhappy, but I could walk. I grabbed a taxi right from the station and rested easy knowing that at least I wouldn’t be searching for my hostel in the dark. When the driver pulled over, pointed to the Medina, and said “just down there, very easy, three minutes”, I couldn’t believe it! My hostel was smack dab in the middle of the market maze! I have been to many, many third world and developing countries’ souks and medinas and I knew what I was in for. It wouldn’t be easy or three minutes. I needed to navigate through a maze of narrow alleyways (with high unbroken concrete walls on both sides) teeming with people and merchants of all kinds, avoid racing scooters, ask someone every 20 feet to help narrow down a door that likely would have no name or number. I didn’t get a Moroccan SIM card as I was staying in hostels that would likely have WIFI most of the time so I couldn’t call or find it in maps and I figured the taxi was a sure bet. It took awhile but I eventually found it. And all was well enough.

I was led to a room on the roof three stories up with open air windows. It was three degrees outside. I laid in bed, called Sabrina and she was aghast – at both the fall and the room. She emphatically pointed out that I was doing hostels to be warm! She said I got the stable special, baby Jesus on the left, pigs on the right. We laughed until I cried. Which was perfect. I needed a good laugh and I needed a good cry. In the end, the blankets were warm, I was safe, laying flat, snuggled in and fell fast asleep. But ya, the day getting to Marrakech was a wild ride!

I am sitting in a small rudimentary room in Algeciras, a port town near Gibraltar. I will take the ferry to Morocco tomorrow. I think it was only yesterday morning that my son Colin dropped me off at the airport, but everything is kind of foggy. My itinerary was Ottawa/Toronto/Dublin/Malaga with multi-hour layovers. I was hoping to grab some sleep somewhere en route as the night before leaving I couldn’t shut my monkey mind down and only slept for a cool 45 minutes. I arrived in Malaga this afternoon with approximately three hours of sleep under my belt over the past two nights. So I missed a lot of the three hour bus ride down the beautiful Costa Del Sol. But I know it was beautiful because I came to at one point when I caught myself falling off my seat and glanced out the window. The thought flitted through my mind that I really should be enjoying the scenery before I lost consciousness again.

I am re-sorting my pack as it was meticulously taken apart and searched in Ottawa. I get randomly get selected every time! Nothing has ever been found. Well, except that one time when my ten-inch long Henckel butchers knife was found in an unused side pocket of my duffel bag after I strenuously insisted I had no knife (I had forgotten it was there from a previous picnic involving a watermelon). They didn’t care for that. Maybe that’s why.

The dash leading up to this trip was busy and full of indecision. The night before leaving, I called my daughter Sabrina and told her I was strongly considering scrapping Morocco, sleeping in my tent after all, and hiking hard in the Spanish mountains. After a short silence she responded, “Have you researched the nighttime weather” I imagined her new mother sleep-deprived, research-oriented brain cells short circuiting at my proposed very last minute total rejigging of plans. In the end, with good input from family, I circled back to my original plan of spending my first three weeks (after which I will be with Sabrina and fam…super excited for that) not sleeping in the tent. While I truly love hiking and sleeping rough, at this time of the year those mountains are cold! And I just don’t want to sleep cold anymore.

This year I am focusing on being kind to myself and mindfully working at body positivity. When I hoisted my back pack to find my waist compression straps fighting for their life my immediate reaction was that I needed enforced food deprivation, hard hiking from dawn to dusk and sleeping on rock (hence the last minute thought to bring my tent). I don’t think that’s the answer. I think a better idea is to be grateful that my body still has the health and strength to take these little jaunts of mine and to treat it with as much love as I can. So I’m going to sleep in hostels, not be cold, and compression straps be damned. Chins up!