Morocco Honeymoon

A short drive south east into the Rif mountains, climbing steadily through cork oak and cannabis country to a town at six hundred metres where every wall is painted a different shade of blue. The tradition is variously traced to Jewish refugees from Spain in the 1930s, to keeping mosquitoes away and to keeping houses cool, and nobody agrees, which is part of the pleasure.

You arrive at lunchtime and the afternoon is for wandering without a guide, which is how Chefchaouen should be done. The medina is small, entirely safe, and impossible to get properly lost in. The Plaza Uta el Hammam under the red kasbah walls is where the whole town sits in the evening.

Dinner tonight is set on your own terrace above the blue roofs, served privately, because the first proper evening of a honeymoon should not be in a dining room.

Forty five minutes north into the Talassemtane national park to Akchour, where a river the colour of a swimming pool runs down a gorge between limestone walls. The path follows the water, crossing it on planks and stones, past a series of small cascades and rock pools that most people cannot resist.

There are two routes and we take whichever suits you. The shorter one climbs forty minutes to the Pont de Dieu, a natural rock arch twenty five metres above the river that looks engineered and is not. The longer one runs about two hours each way up the gorge to the Grande Cascade, a forty metre fall into a pool cold enough to take your breath and deep enough to swim.

Lunch is at one of the simple riverside places where the tables stand in the shallows and the tagine takes an hour because they start it when you order. Back in Chefchaouen by late afternoon, with the rest of the day for the terrace.

You come down out of the Rif into the olive plains and stop at Volubilis, the best preserved Roman city in Morocco, where whole mosaic floors sit open to the sky in a field of wildflowers with storks nesting on the columns. There is usually almost nobody there and an hour is enough.

Ten minutes away, Moulay Idriss Zerhoun spills white down two hills around the tomb of the man who founded the first Moroccan dynasty in 789. It is one of the holiest places in the country and was closed to non Muslims until 2005. We stop for a coffee on the terrace above the square rather than trying to see everything.

You reach Fes in the late afternoon and your riad is inside the medina, with a courtyard, a plunge pool and a terrace. Dinner is yours and we will have booked it if you asked. Fes is best met fresh in the morning rather than tired at night.

Fes el Bali is the largest car free urban area in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited medieval city in the Arab world, and it takes a guide to make sense of it. You walk down through the Talaa Kebira from Bab Boujloud, stopping at the Bou Inania madrasa with its carved cedar and green tiled minaret, and watching the trades change every fifty metres as the street narrows.

The morning covers the Kairaouine, founded in 859 and recognised as the oldest continually operating university on earth, the Attarine madrasa and the Nejjarine fondouk. Lunch is in a private house. In the afternoon the Chouara tanneries from a terrace above the dye pits, and then we stop, because five hours of Fes is enough for anyone.

The evening is free and most couples use it for the riad terrace and an early dinner. If you want the one restaurant in Fes worth dressing for, tell us and we will hold a table.

The longest day of the Morocco Honeymoon Tour and the one that changes the country completely. You climb out of Fes into the Middle Atlas through cedar forest, past Ifrane, a town built by the French in the 1930s that looks like an Alpine village and has the coldest recorded temperature in Africa, and through the Barbary macaque forests at Azrou.

After Midelt the landscape turns from green to red and stays that way. The road follows the Ziz gorge and then the Ziz valley, a corridor of date palms tens of kilometres long with ksour built into the cliffs above it, and then the land flattens into the pre Sahara and there is nothing at all until the dunes appear.

You change to camels at the edge of the erg in the late afternoon and ride in over the crests as the sun drops. Your tented suite has a real bed, rugs, an ensuite bathroom with hot water and a private deck facing the dunes. Dinner is served outside and the sky afterwards has no light pollution for three hundred kilometres in any direction.

Nobody packs today. After breakfast on the sand you take a four wheel drive around the erg with a local driver, out to the dry lake bed where flamingos stop in spring, past the abandoned mines, and along the Algerian border where the dunes simply continue into a country you cannot enter.

You stop at a nomad family camp for tea, sitting on rugs in a tent woven from black goat hair, and then at Khamlia, a village founded by descendants of people brought north along the caravan routes, where the gnawa musicians play a trance music of iron castanets and low drums that exists nowhere else in Morocco in this form.

The afternoon is free at camp for the shade and a book. In the evening a table is carried out over a crest, away from the camp and out of sight of it, and you eat by lantern with nobody else within earshot. It is the one openly romantic thing on this Morocco Honeymoon Tour and it is included rather than sold as an upgrade.

Sunrise from a dune above camp, a slow breakfast, and then west along the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs. The first stop is the Todra gorge, where the canyon walls close to twenty metres apart and rise three hundred metres straight up, with a cold river running out of the rock along the floor. We walk a stretch of it.

Then the Dades valley, the rose town of El Kelaa des Mgouna where the entire Moroccan rose harvest is distilled every May, and finally Skoura, a palm oasis of thirty thousand trees with kasbahs hidden inside it. Your room is in one of them, a restored earth building with a pool under the palms.

This is the quietest night of the Morocco Honeymoon Tour and it is placed here on purpose, between the desert and the city. Dinner is in the kasbah, cooked from what the garden grew, and there is nothing else to do, which is the idea.

A morning walk in the Skoura palm grove before it warms up, then west through Ouarzazate to Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified earth village on the Ounila river that has been a UNESCO site since 1987 and a film set for forty years. You cross the river and climb through it with a local guide to the granary at the top.

Then the Tizi n Tichka, the pass over the High Atlas at more than two thousand two hundred metres, where the road climbs in switchbacks with the villages getting smaller below and, from December to March, snow on the peaks either side. The northern slope is green and much steeper, and Marrakech appears in the plain below in the late afternoon.

Your Marrakech riad is inside the medina with a garden rather than a bare courtyard, a heated pool and a room with its own terrace. After four days on the road the correct plan for the evening is to not leave the house.

A guided morning at your own pace: the Saadian tombs, hidden behind a wall from 1603 until a French aerial survey found them in 1917 and lined with Carrara marble and gold leaf, the Bahia palace with its painted cedar ceilings, and the Ben Youssef madrasa, which has the finest interior in the city. Then the souks with a guide who takes no commission from anyone.

The afternoon is the hammam, booked as a private hire so that the two of you are the only people in the building. Black soap, kessa scrub, rhassoul clay and a full argan oil massage each, then an hour lying down with mint tea. Do not plan anything for ninety minutes afterwards.

The last dinner is served privately on your own riad terrace, with the medina below and the Koutoubia lit in the distance. It is the second and final arranged dinner of the Morocco Honeymoon Tour, and it is the right way to finish.

Breakfast on the terrace, held as late as you want it, and then a car to Menara timed to your flight with two hours of margin. If you fly in the evening we can hold the room until the afternoon and add a last swim, which is worth doing.

Anything you bought that will not fit in a case, a rug from the Atlas or ceramics from Fes, we will already have arranged shipping for. Your driver walks you as far as the terminal doors.