I left you about two weeks ago at the coast in Agadir, which was a largely disappointing place, owing mainly to its almost complete destruction in a 1963 earthquake and subsequent rebuilding along Eastern European lines - lugubrious low concrete structures which are already beginning to crumble and flake, with just the odd hardy stone building dotted around here and there. Not inspiring in any way, but the main aim of coming here was simple - a spot of r+r after three days braving the souqs and medina of sweaty, noisy Marrakech and another three slogging through the High Atlas with Mules and a slave-driving guide.

Agadir sported a beach which was more then adequate, and I suppose it fulfilled its role in a sense. The long surf of the Atlantic was surprisingly warm and pleasant to bathe in, surrounded as it was by a protective bay and mountains to one side. It was chock full of mostly Moroccan holiday makers, making the most of the fag end of holiday season. By Moroccan standards, it was quite liberal - a few naked chests were proudly strutted by the men, and some of the less coy women were out and about in their bathers. Mostly though, Moroccans aren't particularly given to showing off their bodies in public; nudity would certainly be frowned on. Even public shows of affection are clamped down on - a policeman approached Natalia and I at one point when I had barely placed a peck on her cheek. Not the most tolerant nation when it comes to sex you might say. As a result, perhaps, Morocco is not a great beach country: the few resorts scattered down the long Atlantic coast have hardly attained international acclaim, and this leg of the trip in my mind wasn't going to throw up any particular gems.

Still, we enjoyed a slothful couple of days in Agadir and then decided to move up the coast to possibly Morocco's premier beach resort, Essaourria, to see what else the coast had to offer. Owing to some cock-eyed planning, I knew we would have to back-track to Agadir again in order to see some places in the south - and having read the guidebook I wasn't really interested in pressing on further up the coast to the north; so this was to be the furthest we would get along the coast in this direction. The coach journey was longer than expected - four and a half hours instead of the advertised three - mainly owing to the coach being old and crap, but also because of a self-indulgent 45 minute break in some flea-pit because the driver fancied a kebab. The system of purchase at these places is interesting. You have to first queue up at a roadside butcher who will sell you quarter of a pound of meat, then you join another queue and patiently wait whilst your pattie is cooked by the man in charge of the barbeque. An interesting system, not unlike some of the ideas used in Soviet times to keep people in full employment. The whole procedure takes a good ten to fifteen minutes at times of high demand like when a coachload of people are hungrily wating. Highly irritating, and the quality of meat and overall hygeine of the operation are open to question; but when you finally get your sandwich, you do appreciate it.

Arriving in Essaourria at dusk, we were attacked by old crones at the bus station, keen to get us to stay in their house. These situations can be stressful at the best of times; but when aggressively pushed, pulled and harried by them, it is pretty hard to remain calm. Even after I selected someone who looked like they might have a house that may be presentable to some degree, several others trailed us down the road, expectantly, hoping we would change our minds. Which we emphatically didn't, although as we trudged down a road which smelt rather overpoweringly of raw sewage a few minutes later, we rather wished we had. It seems the local authorities had decided to choose holiday season to dig up the sewage and drainage system in half the city, and it made navigation not only difficult, but very smelly. We eventually got to the (thankfully reasonable) house, agreed some nominal price for the night and dumped our stuff before heading to the medina and beach before sunset. A stroll along the beach was accompanied by a bracing wind which made me grateful for my sweater. We escaped to a beachfront restaurant and enjoyed a nice fish soup and tagine before retiring to one of the few bars that sold beer. The 'Stork' I bought was of pretty good quality and not that overpriced, so I let my hair down and had three. Well they were big (by Moroccan standard) - 330ml.

The next day was spent lounging on the beach. We hired a couple of sun-loungers and I settled back to read 'The Beach' - appropriately enough. I eyed a few of the beach games going on - it seems the craze this year is a particularly mundane game in which you each have a bat and a kind of pingpong ball and have to pat it to each other for as long as possible..and that's it. Amazing, why couldn't I have thought of that? Wouldn't have to do any more of this teaching business. As the sun drifted towards the horizon, I looked at my arms and legs, which had gone a particularly fetching shade of lobster red; forgot the sunlotion again. We trotted along the promenade and, rounding a corner, came to the part of town where fishing boats put to and sell their wares to tourists. We warily approached one; I picked up a still-alive but quite tempting looking crab and asked "C'est combien?" and the salesman picked up a few handfuls of fresh prawns, some large sardines and what looked like a red snapper, and said "150 Dirhams, with salad and drinks"; at about nine pounds between us, this represented good value, so we sat down as our guy roasted them on the barbeque. They arrived on several plates five minutes later, suitably charred but delicious. Natalia picked at the prawns and left most for me, which I didn't complain too much about. As I squeezd lemon and lime juice over the not-long-dead sealife, I thought "This is the way I want to eat seafood in the future. Fresh, clean, straight out of the sea."

Of course I was to regret these thoughts later that night. It wasn't long after a pleasant stroll along the pier, where I got some enviable sunset pictures of the battlements surrounding the seaward side of the town, that I had to leg it to a hotel toilet to get rid of the recently consumed seafood in a rather forceful manner. I don't think my request to have a look at the hotel's rooms afterwards assuaged the receptionist too much.

A walk through the souks and central medina of the town revealed another labyrinthine mass of streets going off in all directions, crowded with traders and tourists looking for bargains. It was rather less stressful than Marrakech's souk, and although from time to time someone would try to tempt us into their jewellery / carpet / clothes shop, they weren't too forceful and my wallet remained unsullied. I had the aim of getting my watch fixed by a competent jeweller, as the previous day I had swum in my watch having just had the battery replaced and it had seized up. I eventually found one after some searching, and abandoned my watch to him for the night, reassured by the words that the damage was "Pas trop grave". I thought these words might come back to haunt me. As Natalia was also feeling a bit ropey, we headed home early by petite taxi and I headed to an internet cafe to write my last email. I picked my way home carefully through the barely-lit streets past the potentially lethal holes in the ground and large, pungent puddles of water gathered around them.

The next day was another relaxing affair which I won't bore you with, until the point I came to collecting my watch from the jeweller. I left Natalia in a cafe promising confidently that I would be back "in five minutes, ten max". I wondered in the direction of the souq, entered and went in the direction I thought the jeweller was. Of course I didn't know where it was, and after several protracted attempts, and retracing of steps, I gave up and went back to Natalia, breezily saying that I had got held up buying a kebab and thought it best to return to her to make sure she was ok. As we reentered the souq, I asked in as inconspicuous a way as possible if this was definitely the way back to the jewellers' shops. As her sense of direction is considerably worse than mine, this tactic didn't work. It took me a further twenty minutes of searching; blundering down blind alleys, backtracking, trying to find recognisable landmarks and eventually, triumphantly locating the darned jeweller. Finding that my watch had in fact needed major surgery (a fact that the jeweller explained with much shaking of the head, remonstrating and pointing at delicate cogs and sprockets and other watch paraphanalia I wouldn't have a clue what to name) and would in fact cost four times more than originally estimated, did not lighten my mood.

We left on a bus that evening from a crowded, noisy bus station for a town called Tiznit, 250km south and past Agadir to the south. The bus journey was awful. Hot, sweaty and cramped, also in pitch darkness with no reading light option, I had nothing to do but sit and wait (not even an mp3 player to alleviate the boredom), which I did for 6 hours. I find it impossible to sleep on buses or trains, or even to relax in certain situations. We eventually pulled up at a bus stop clearly out of the town centre but right next to a hotel which, grotty and uninviting though it was, had a bed on which we could get some much-needed sleep. As we arose next morning, Natalia was complaining of severe stomach cramps, and we went straight to the hospital after breakfast. Luckily, she was diagnosed with nothing worse than mild food poisoning, given a prescription for pills and told to spend the day in bed. We found a better place to stay in the centre and had a quick look round before Natalia gave up for the day and went to bed.

I had a day to myself, and having rid myself of a particularly trying local who was determined to show me all of Tiznit's sights, including his cousin's silver jewellery shop (Tiznit being a big silver-producing area and therefore renowned for the quality and abundance of its jewellery), I took a 'Grand Taxi' the 16km to 'Aglou Plage', the local beach. Grand Taxis are actually just normal Mercedes, which are only big when compared to the average taxi in Morocco, the Fiat Uno. They are, however, an embodiment of the national urge not to waste anything, so they cram six passengers into them - two in the front with the driver and four in the back, and they are charged roughly 20 percent more for any such journey than the bus equivalent. On short journies, buses are usually preferable, but they come into their own on longer ones, especially through mountains, which they whiz through and half journey times. Of course, on the negative side is the comfort factor. We were crushed like sardines in the back of that twenty year old Merc and it was quite a relief to get out.

Aglou Plage looked like Whitley Bay beach on a bad day. As we had neared the coast from Tiznit, the fog had enveloped us, and as I stepped out of the car into a stiff cool breeze and the smell of salt and seaweed, I was taken back to dreadful summers trudging along English promenades. Forlornly, I took a picture from the prom which could for all the world have been in Cullercoats. I was considering taking the first taxi back to Tiznit when I spotted a doughnut stall and filled up on several tasty doughnuts before braving the beach again. I determined to stroll along the beach until I got bored, and grimly headed off into ther fog and gale. After a few minutes, I came to some quite dramatic rocks which the sea was battering against quite fiercely. I sat down and started experimenting with the digital camera, and as I did so the fog retreated and the sun played with the dark clouds - making some great photographic opportunities. The hills behind the beach appeared out of the gloom, and the beach took on a quite picturesque aspect suddenly. I don't think this stretch of coast is ever going to win any awards, and the weather can be unpredictable, but I realised that it had some character.

I returned to Tiznit in better spirits, to find Natalia had also improved. To my surprise, she had even been to Aglou Plage as well; I was astonished - how had this turn of events come about, I asked. Apparently, about two o'clock she started feeling better when there came a knock on the hotel door. It was a guy who claimed to be my friend and was saying that I wanted her to come to Aglou Plage; he had returned to get her. He had been perfectly honest and straightforward and she had believed him. They took the taxi down to the beach, looked round, didn't see me and came back. The guy had made some vaguely ambiguous comments to me about himself being married, and he had asked me if I was. I had heard that in Moroccan culture (and Arab culture generally), it is perfectly permissable for men to take mistresses if they are married. If a woman (especially western) is with a guy but they are not married, they seem to consider them fair game and they use some pretty underhand tactics to get them. I asked her if he had done anything, said anything strange, and she admitted he had made some odd sexual remarks. Fortunately, nothing else happened. I still didn't know how he knew where she was staying. He turned out to be the brother of the hotel owner.

Next morning, we left without paying and I considered informing the police, but as nothing had actually been done, there was nothing anybody could do, as it were. I was glad to get out of Tiznit, it is the only place in Morocco I've been to where I didn't feel comfortable - everyone seemed spookily to know who we were within a couple of hours of arriving - and the evening had been atrociously difficult, just trying to find a restaurant proved an impossible task as several 'friendly' guys offered their services to help us. We had accepted the help of one, who then proceeded to trail us for the rest of the evening, literally. He even waited in a restaurant while we had dinner until I politely told him to do one as we got in a taxi. Even the taxi driver seemed to play funny b*****s with us, pretending not to know where the central square was until I completely lost it with him and bellowed in his ear "CENTRE S'IL VOUS PLAIT!" God knows what his game was, but I wasn't having any of it.

Next on the agenda was Mirleft, a little hippy coastal town which we cruised into via Grand Taxi. We were considering just spending the morning there, but as soon as we arrived, it fely so relaxed and chilled out compared to Tiznit that we immediately decided to stay. Nothing much of note happened in our night in Mirleft, but we found a lovely quiet hotel with terrace and patio to relax on, and spent the rest of the day pottering around the town, which was set below a hill with a ruined Spanish Bastion on it. We also had time for a spot of sunbathing, as the weather had improved dramatically since the day before and Mirleft is blessed with some fantastic beaches. From there I contemplated the next few days, which would take us 900km east and to the edge of the Sahara.