Reviews of Holidays and Hotels in Morocco - The Road Through Morocco

The Mail on Sunday, 24 Jan 2005

The road through Morocco

By Marion Bull

After I last heard music 12 years ago, when I became profoundly deaf, a strange thing happened.

The brain compensates for total silence by 'imagining' sounds. So from a roof terrace cafe overlooking Marrakesh's vast Djemaa El Fna square I knew thet the performers with tassles orbiting their hats were not playing Berber music - it was the theme from The Sting.

Even the most travelwise can't prepare for this town of a thousand Del Boys, with its toothpullers and soothsayers. But like the gummy snakes in the square, you're eventually charmed.

As wood smoke curled through a pink dusk and lamps lit the orange-juice stalls, proceedings really got under way. Essentially it's a Moroccan thing, and tourists are innocent voyeurs, there to cough up a few dirham for a photo.

Suddenly, after an argument with its keeper, a monkey flung its nappy into a crowd that veered towards a fortune teller who passed out. We all peered over the balcony, clutching our bottles of Citron.

Just up the road, Hugh Grant had been quietly playing golf that day, but even he didn't have such an audience.

After a stroll round the Yves St Laurent-inspired Majorelle garden in the modern Gueliz district, I re-entered the Medina and the souks. I missed a planned lunch in La Mamounia, hotel of les stars - I was too busy haggling over something or other I knew I would never need.

It was the same later with a carpet that was far too big. 'I'll cut it in half,' said the Arab. Curly-toed babouches, too small? 'You'll grow into them,' he said, with a trader's logic. I hobbled away. Nothing's impossible.

I retreated to the serenity of a riad, a classy B&B. Parisianowned Riad Aida, all burnished walls and cedar wood ceilings, was part of a palace and is now used in fashion shoots.

Riad means garden in Arabic. Our rooms were built round elegant central courtyards, and Hayat, our superb cook, served tagine dishes by candlelight.

'Here we have found a perfect heaven,' wrote Elizabeth and James from Herefordshire in the visitors' book. And here it was.

In one of the oldest streets near the square, the Jnane Mogador Hotel, also a riad and former merchant's house, has the same quiet charm. I stayed at this one on my return from a short trip south.

For me, Marrakesh was really the starting point for a journey of extremes, from the 12,700ft snow-covered Jbel Toubkal in the High Atlas, to the edges of the Sahara.

I travelled with hired driver Aziz to the dunes of Tinfou, 250 miles south. En route to Zagora, the fertile Draa Valley opens up after a seriously good stretch of rocky desert between Marrakech and Ouarzazate.

The roadside glitters with quartz geodes at the end of every outstretched skinny arm - stalls have been set up on even the most remote mountain bend.

I looked ungainly crossing a river on a donkey to reach Ait Benhaddou, Morocco's finest kasbah (fortified village), but not half as bad as the driver, who waded across. He was wearing longjohns. It wasn't like this in Lawrence Of Arabia, where the film was partly shot.

Further south I saw the studios of Ouarzazate, location for more than 25 international movies. Immediately the fake city gates evoked visions of the character Port, played by John Malkovich, in Bertolucci's film from Paul Bowles's superb novel, The Sheltering Sky.

After red pisé (fortified mud villages), past fields of henna, and a date palmery that stretches for some 150 miles along the Draa river, you get the first sense of the desert proper at Zagora - if only because of the promise of Timbuktu in 52 days (by camel).

The famous peeling signpost still stands, near Zagora's first hotel, the Ksar Tinsouline, built in 1948. There I met Tony, an Englishman who'd travelled from Stourbridge on a motorbike, and was still going south.

Later, at Tinfou I climbed a high dune, and a few hours after that, at the top of the vertiginous Tizi N'Test pass in the High Atlas en route back to Marrakesh, I trudged through snow.

Vehicles have to pass each other on a single track or drop 2,000 metres, but if you can get here in the autumn, you will have passed mountains transformed into seas of purple. Organic saffron extracted from autumn crocus flowers is used in cooking and as a dye in Berber carpets.

It takes about a week to gather enough flowers for one gram of the stuff, so it's very expensive, the best anywhere.

By the time I got back to Marrakesh I'd bought armfuls.