by In Tangier, fresh off the ferry from Spain, I walk along the esplanade in the cool morning air, then take the steps up to the casbah. My trip to Morocco started at St Pancras station in London three days earlier, and I spent a night each in Barcelona and Algeciras. I don’t feel any of the dislocation or awkwardness that would be involved in flying. I have seen the changing landscapes: the lavender fields of Provence, the peach groves of Catalonia, then the magic of the wild highlands of La Mancha. I saw my first Arabic sign in Spain yesterday. Now Tangier’s crafted casbah seems like the next natural step. I turn up a narrow path and pass an elderly couple, the woman in a straw hat decorated with fresh flowers, her husband hooded in thick burnt wool.
The casbah is quiet. I stumble into the one place where things are happening: the meat market. By western supermarket standards, this bazaar is a challenge: whole carcasses dripping blood on hooks, a man sorting through yards of slithery steak with his bare hands.
Morocco was once a place where Westerners were in charge of a good dose of culture shock. In 1867 Mark Twain envisioned the journey that would become his classic, The Innocents Abroad: “We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly – foreign from top to bottom – foreign from center to periphery – alien inside and outside and around – nothing anywhere about him to dilute his alien – nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! In Tangier we have found it…”
He wasn’t the only one. William Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch in a Tangier hotel room. Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles all came for inspiration. Later came the musicians: Graham Nash jumped on the Marrakesh Express in 1966; Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast, inspired Hendrix’s Castles Made of Sand, and the Rolling Stones almost came to grief here in 1967.
But that’s history: what about now?
We loop back into the Atlas Mountains and a miraculous green ribbon of fertility curls from a slot canyon
Tangier station is clean and cool, the high speed train leaves on time and we are soon speeding down the coast. At Casablanca I change to an older, slower train, but to be honest I’m happy with the change in speed. I want to see the surroundings: the magnificent bougainvillaea, the vast pastures dotted with flocks and shepherds, the houses built for heat and cold. The station at Marrakech, when I arrive, is as swift and sweeping as Europe can offer. They are putting new sewers into the casbah. No one is joking about offering me hashish or biting my hand.
In fact, I will admit with a pang of anxiety. Is Morocco healthy? Does everyone go home happy with their Instagram full of sky pools and golf courses? As soon as I walk into the casbah, however, that fear begins to dissipate.
I have one night in Marrakech to meet my sister, Jo, who came separately (we are here before the September 8th earthquake, but I have heard that the signs of its impact in the capital have been cleared). We immediately go out to inspect. The old city is not so much a labyrinth as a complex series of embedded mazes. If you’re not lost within a minute, you’re not trying hard. Eventually we end up in Djemaa el-Fna square, where there is a snake charmer who looks like he swallowed all the dope. The food stalls say, “Dear, you must eat here. We are the best. No diarrhea is guaranteed.”
When the lamps are lit, the square is spectacular. Down one path, a boy moves beside us and tries to set fire to a leather belt – to prove it’s real. And there, in front of me, is a young man with wild hair, a dusty backpack, boots falling apart, eyes shining unnaturally. It is a survivor of the great old days. It’s from 1969. It’s on the Marrakesh Express. I can’t ask the boy to test the ghost’s belt for reality.
The next day we join a group doing some rock climbing and yoga on a trek across the snowy Atlas Mountains (the areas we visit felt the September earthquake but escaped largely unscathed) . We stop at designated “tourist friendly” places where there were lots of people selling jewellery, but the natural bonhomie of Morocco soon wins out over commercialism. I am taken on an impromptu tour of a traditional home and introduced to the matriarch of the family. Going to a “desert experience” isn’t my kind of thing, a clunkingly kitsch campsite complete with men dressed as Tuareg warriors, but the huge golden sand dunes are impressive. “They come north every year,” a local tells me. I watch tourists on quad bikes zipping up and down them, surfing the wave of the climate crisis.
We loop back into the southern side of the Atlas Mountains and a miraculously vivid green ribbon curls out of a slot canyon in a rock wall. This is Wadi Todra, in places half a mile wide, but generally much narrower. Ever since the Berbers came here from the east, they have built shelters on these steep rocky banks. No one knows the exact origins of these people: they call themselves Amazigh, but Egypt, Ethiopia and Yemen have been suggested as possible starting points. The mud architecture of the Hadhramaut region in east-central Yemen reminds me: great towers and citadels of mud and thatch, now surrounded by concrete and block buildings that at least try to imitate that original style. One tradition is strictly adhered to: the houses in that precious ribbon of fertility are only built on the rock above.
Peach and quince trees are in bloom. The path is winding. We arrive at a magnificent ancient mosque
Suddenly, Jo and I decide to leave the vehicle about nine miles from our destination. We will then walk inside the narrow part of the canyon and along this green valley. Down here are tiny, tidy fields of mint, carrots and wheat, each gurgling with a channel of water. A donkey is being loaded with alfalfa wrapped in a sack. Hoops go on his feet. Bright heads flip up from a fresh field of barley. Two women, their chins and cheeks tattooed with crosses, smile and go back to serving their crops. The peach and quince trees are in bloom. The path is winding. We arrive at a magnificent ancient mosque, Ikelane, near Tinghir, and find its caretaker, Addi, who shows us around. “The casbah of Afalour has been abandoned since the 1970s,” he tells me, “People wanted to live in new houses near the road. They had more kids and needed more rooms.”
The mosque itself is an architectural gem, but behind it lies the abandoned casbah, the crumbling mud towers, like an artistic miracle of chocolate ice cream. In ten years it could all be gone. The families who left now need the land. Add shrugs. “The old route needed maintenance. It rains heavier here and that means when the water gets in the buildings disappear faster. We can only keep this mosque safe.”
We explore the cool, spacious interior and panoramic roof terrace overlooking the date palms and peach trees, then back to the green ribbon, picking our way along the edges of the park and streams.
Two toddlers playing a game. Apparently it’s called ‘Chuck dust in the air and scream with joy when it lands on you’
Finally, we rejoin the road and arrive at our hotel near the rock climbing walls of the canyon. The next day, with guides Dan and Max, our small group spends the day climbing some excellent rock. We drink from a spring in the canyon wall and a picnic is brought up from the village. In the evening we do intense yoga with Dan’s partner, Natalie, on the roof of the house. They arrived here shortly before the pandemic and decided, in an instant, to end their careers in the UK and start a new life. “The pandemic really helped us,” says Dan, “It gave us time to get to know people, and they realized that we were really committed to living here.”
Related: My epic three day journey from London to Morocco by train and ferry
There are challenges. “Trying to get people to understand plastic litter is difficult,” says Natalie. However, the gorge can: there are hundreds of climbing routes, most of which are particularly suitable for beginners or moderately skilled climbers like myself. The course attracts beginners, but also more experienced climbers looking at the possibilities of Morocco.
One day Dan takes us up on the plateau to meet a friend of his: Ahmed, an 82-year-old Bedouin grandfather who lives in a cave, looking after his goats. His daughter is carding goat hair to make a new summer tent. Two barefoot children are playing a game. Apparently it’s called “Chuck dust and dirt in the air and then scream with joy when it lands on you”. They keep this up the whole time we are drinking tea with Ahmed and they only stop when three baby goats approach to start a new game called “Case baby goat and cuddle them”.
Before we leave, Ahmed wants to show me something: his flour mill. After digging a cave into the bedrock, he searches through his possessions: empty flour sacks, battered goat skins and a few clothes. Eventually he finds hand-turned granite, which is simple enough, but so balanced that it requires little effort. There is no electricity here, or running water, but Ahmed doesn’t want to go anywhere else. They are surrounded by vast panoramas of unspoiled skeletal mountains. Two sons left the town to get an education – one of them is now a lawyer – but Ahmed will remain on the rocky plateau where he was born. For all the development and high-speed rail links, Morocco gave me my Mark Twain moment.
Overland travel was provided by EURail and FRS ferries. The Atlas Mountains tour was provided by Much Better Adventures, whose six-night Intro to Rock Climbing and Yoga tour costs from £713pp. The earthquake of 8 September 2023 had devastating consequences for villages and towns in the western Atlas Mountains, with more than 2,900 deaths. The climbing area on this trip was not hit, however. Marrakech was also damaged, but business is now back to normal.
