Essouira – Riding into the town, you get hassled from all sorts, while you’re still on the bike. If you’re lucky enough to find a free parking spot to pull into, you’ll be nagged to come to a specific hotel, and as you ride on you’ll come across a bloke in a luminous vest directing you to the side of the road. Don’t as this is just a car park and they’ll charge you probably extra for it. We couldn’t find any hotels in the Rough Guide, so we asked at an obviously posh hotel for their prices. 1200Dh, about £85, for the night – no thanks. Standing outside this hotel, some Londoner pulled up on his locally registered TDM 850 and says we can stay at his house for the night, right in the middle of the medina. He and his wife were out of town for the night so we had a 3 storey Riad all to ourselves for £25. The roof terrace should have afforded a scenic view over the roof tops of the town, but the vista was spoiled by satellite dishes.

They showed us to a parking garage, about 500 yards away (no bikes allowed into the medina), where a local looks after the bike all night. We hired a local barrow-man to push our luggage, and after stopping off at a Muslim off-licence (a bizarre experience in itself), we got our stuff home. The going rate for these barrow men is 10Dh (75p), but I felt guilty about this so I gave him a whopping 30Dh, which he obviously appreciated by his reaction to us when we saw him the next morning.

In the evening, we found a French restaurant which was showing the Rugby World Cup final, between England & South Africa. I was outnumbered by about 50–1, so my cheering the final result wasn’t appreciated by all. My sleep was a bit disturbed that night, principally due to the central location. Not only was there noise outside, but i'm convinced to this day, as is Jen, that we were not alone in that house.