Morocco - Where Worlds Collide

I feel immediately lost in Marrakech. As we drive from the airport, the warm night air is filled with unfamiliar chants from minarets. We pass hundreds of men kneeling in prayer in the gardens outside the central mosque. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we were visiting in the middle of Ramadan.

Our riadh is a ten-minute walk (in theory) to the main square in Marrakech called Jemaa El-fnaa. The old town of Marrakech is a giant impenetrable maze. Map-reading skills will only get you so far. A ball of string may also be required to find your way back to anywhere. We spend time trying to remember markers,"Past the shop with the spices. No, not that shop with the spices, the other shop with spices…."
To be honest, we spend most of our stay lost in Marrakech. But being lost is a big part of the fun of staying here, and after a little while, you learn that most routes go eventually to Jemaa El-fnaa square.
Jemaa El Fnaa square is one gigantic tourist photo opportunity if you’re into that kind of thing. Turban headed men charm pythons out of baskets and chained spider monkeys climb obediently around tourist necks. I get upset when I see the tiny cages where the monkeys are kept in the hot sun. Morocco’s not a great place to be an animal. At one end of the square, there’s a guy in a fez selling human teeth. Who’s in the market for teeth, I wonder, in a square crowded full of Western tourists with excellent dental plans. I spend a good half hour watching who’s buying. It seems to be working for him and plenty of cash is changing hands for selfies with this Moroccan tooth fairy. He hasn’t parted with a single tooth.
Fact: Moroccans are great salesmen. Local Moroccan men seem to helpfully spring up from street corners, falling over themselves to help lost tourists find their way out of the souk or to the ‘best’ restaurant in town (owned by their uncle), all for a fee. They will even show you around putrid tannery pits with no health and safety considerations, where they make, and then you buy, a flattened Moroccan leather pouffe that most tourists seem to think are dog baskets. I now know why there are so many of these useless items in the living rooms across Britain.
With a strong Gallic colonial history, Marrakech has a chic French quarter. Boulangeries sit cheek by jowl with the cheeks and jowls of squawking chickens in the pop-up market stall at the end of the road. Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Marjorelle, a sculptured garden of giant cacti and Japanese ponds, creates a designer take on tranquillity from the chaos of the old town just a few streets away. French designers were drawn to Morocco for their world-class products. For Yves St Laurent it was the leather. In the Valley of the Roses, Dades Valley, each day for two weeks in May, millions of rose petals are gathered by the women before dawn and made into the world’s finest rose oil. Female farmer collectives sell the oil to exclusive French perfume houses.
Marrakech is fascinating, chaotic and brutal. At our riadh the night receptionist Abdullah tells us that he works all night at the hotel and studies for his Master's degree in International Finance and Economics in the day. He’s a clever lad who dreams about doing his PhD in Paris. Our conversation is interrupted with a knock at the door. A small child with a very large jerry can begs for water from the riadh. “Look” says Abdullah, “I tell you my dreams but there are people here who can’t even afford water.”
Next day we head out to the High Atlas mountains on a three-day tour. Being small we are given seats by the driver, three up in the front of the minibus. But with 180-degree views, we’ve scored the best seats on the bus. We enjoy three days of amazing mountain and desert scenery travelling through the High Atlas and along the Anti-Atlas range out to the desert. Our driver doesn’t have great English. Every now and again he points out a Berber woman walking with a huge bundle of alfalfa on her back and a similarly loaded donkey to the side. He nudges me and says, "Woman working."
I reply, pointing at the donkey, "Berber tractor."

He laughs. But I know he’s thinking that I should be at home tending my wheat, and... who’s looking after the donkey?
We stop to visit villages and learn more about traditional Berber life. Each visit ends just like Disney, in the family gift shop where you can buy handmade carpets which can be conveniently shrink-wrapped for air flights. Handily, their traditional adobe houses built of baked dung and straw also has 4G wifi with all major credit cards accepted.

We visit the Unesco world heritage desert village of Ait Benhaddou. Rising out of the desert dust, Ait Benhaddou unusually sits on a river with water flowing through. This place must have been a welcome sight for the traders selling slaves and salt to the Romans emerging from the Sahara on this ancient desert trade route. As a reminder of the past, there is a sign pointing South into the sands beyond. It says, ‘Timbuktu 12 days.’
But Ait Benhaddou has a much more glamorous industry now. It’s the leading venue for all desert movie scenes. Hosting some of the largest film studios in the world, this place is the backdrop for everything from Iraqi shoot-em-ups to sand-and-sandals movies. Even Game of Thrones was filmed here. The ‘ancient gates’ at the left of the village is a film set remnant from The Jewel of the Nile and Gladiator.

We continue on to Merzouga, situated in the Sahara, bordering on Algeria. Bedouin boys take us on long camel trains into the Saharan dunes to a traditional desert camp. They feed us and flirt with a group of pretty Spanish fashion students. We watch the sun go down over the Sahara and listen to the boys singing, dancing, drumming and flirting into the wee small hours. A skinny middle-aged Brazilian lady on the tour complains noisily about the pain of camel travel, demanding a 4x4 to take her bony bum back the next morning. I am pleased to report that I have no such difficulties with my booty which seems to be extremely well designed for camel travel.