Destinations

Agadir is Morocco’s beach resort — 300 days of sunshine, 10-kilometre Atlantic beach, 22°C average temperature, and a restaurant-bar strip that caters to Northern European winter escapees. It’s the least “Moroccan” of Morocco’s major cities, which is either a feature…

I got lost in Fez medina within 20 minutes of entering. My phone showed three different streets simultaneously. A local pointed me toward a landmark that wasn’t actually nearby. Another guide offered to lead me out for 100 dirhams. The…

Chefchaouen is the blue city. Every wall, door, step, fountain, and plant pot painted in some shade of blue — cobalt, cerulean, powder blue, indigo, turquoise. From a distance, nestled against the Rif Mountains, the whole medina looks like a…

Casablanca is the Morocco that Moroccans actually live in. Not the romantic medina labyrinth of Marrakech or the royal gardens of Rabat — Casablanca is a port city of 3.7 million people, the country’s economic capital, Art Deco buildings mixed…

By the end of the exfoliation I was convinced my attendant was trying to start a fight. She was not. She was just doing her job — scrubbing my back with a black gommage soap and a rough glove called…

The first time I saw Aït Benhaddou, I’d been in a van for 3.5 hours crossing the High Atlas. The kasbah emerged around a bend — a fortified ochre pile rising out of a riverbank, palms at its base, looking…

Youssef was our guide, a Marrakech native with strong opinions about bread. He led us through five medina streets to a bakery he said was “the only place still making real khobz,” ordered four loaves for a table of six,…

On my second walk through the Marrakech medina, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a silversmith’s alley that wasn’t on my map. The guide from my first visit hadn’t mentioned it. A man was hammering a 500-year-old…

The first thing that hits you at Majorelle isn’t the plants. It’s the blue. A shade of cobalt so saturated it looks artificial — painted on every wall, planter, fountain rim, and window frame. The rest of the world looks…

The alarm went off at 4:30am and my body asked what I could possibly be doing with my life. Forty minutes later, standing in a Berber camp an hour outside Marrakech with a glass of mint tea in one hand…

The wind in Essaouira has its own personality. It arrives from the Atlantic by mid-morning and doesn’t stop. It’s why the fishing boats return before noon, why the medina cafés have wind-blocking windbreaks, and why the city has been the…

The dune was maybe 80 metres high and I was climbing it in sand that slid out from under each step. Three steps up, two steps back. By the top, my lungs were burning, my legs were shaking, and the…

The quad bike kicked up a rooster-tail of ochre dust behind me and I leaned into the turn at maybe 35 km/h, which felt like 100. Palm trees on both sides, red earth underneath, Atlas Mountains on the horizon. I…