Morocco for Women

A morning in the medina with your guide, taking in the Ben Youssef madrasa, the Saadian tombs and the spice and food souks, which is where the day turns practical because you are shopping for lunch rather than sightseeing.

Then three hours in a private riad kitchen with a Moroccan cook. You make a tagine from scratch, learn to fold a pastilla and roll couscous by hand, which almost nobody does any more, and eat all of it together on the terrace. The spice blends are learned by smell rather than from a printed sheet.

The afternoon is free, and the evening is the private hammam: black soap, kessa scrub, rhassoul clay and an argan oil massage each, with the whole place hired for the group. Afterwards, an hour lying down with mint tea and nothing else planned.

Two hours south of the city the plain ends and the mountains begin. You climb through Asni into a valley of walnut and cherry trees with flat roofed earth villages stacked up the slopes, and stop at a weaving cooperative run and owned by its members.

You spend the afternoon there. You will see the natural dyes, madder for red and indigo and pomegranate skin for yellow, sit at a loom and understand within ten minutes why a hand knotted rug takes three months. The women will tell you what the cooperative changed, which in this valley includes land bought in women s names for the first time. We take no commission on anything at all.

You sleep in a village guesthouse run by a family, with a terrace over the valley and a wood fire in the evening. Dinner is cooked in the house from what the valley grew and you eat it with the women who made it.

East and then south over the Tizi n Tichka, the pass that crosses the High Atlas above two thousand two hundred metres, with snow on the peaks from December to March and the road climbing in long switchbacks. Over the top the country turns red and stays that way.

You stop at Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified earth village on the Ounila river that has been a UNESCO site since 1987, and climb through it with a local guide to the granary at the top for the view over the valley. Lunch is in the village.

Then east along the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs to the Dades valley, arriving in the late afternoon at a small house on the valley side with a terrace looking down the gorge. It is a quiet night before the desert, which is deliberate.

First 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 in the morning while the light is still coming down the walls.

Then east through Tinejdad and Erfoud, where the rock is full of four hundred million year old marine fossils and the workshops cut and polish them. Beyond Erfoud the road runs straight through flat black desert and then the dunes of Erg Chebbi appear on the left like a range of mountains made of sand.

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 electricity through the night. Dinner is outside and the sky afterwards has no light pollution for three hundred kilometres.

Nobody packs today, which after four days of moving is the best sentence on the itinerary. After breakfast on the sand you take a four wheel drive around the erg, out to the dry lake bed where flamingos stop in spring and along the Algerian border where the dunes simply continue into a country you cannot enter.

You stop at a nomad family camp, where you sit in a tent woven from black goat hair and drink tea with the women of the household. Your guide translates, and because the group is women the conversation goes to places it would not otherwise. There is nothing for sale at the end and we pay the family a fixed fee.

In the afternoon, Khamlia, a village of descendants of people brought north along the caravan routes, where the gnawa musicians play a trance music of iron castanets and low drums. The afternoon back at camp is free, and dinner is under the sky again.

The one long day, and we do not pretend otherwise. Sunrise from a dune above camp, breakfast, and then west through Rissani, the old caravan capital built on the ruins of Sijilmasa where the Alaouite dynasty began, and on through the palm belt of the Draa.

We break the drive properly with a long lunch and two or three stops rather than pushing through, and we come back over the Tichka in the afternoon so the last hour is the Atlas going green again rather than more desert.

You are back at the riad in the early evening with your luggage waiting. The last dinner is on the terrace, cooked in the house, and it goes on as long as it goes on.

A last morning built around your flights, which in a group usually means several different departure times. Your guide is available for anyone who wants two more hours in the souk, and the riad holds rooms for whoever leaves last.

Anything too large to carry, a rug from the cooperative above all, we will already have arranged shipping for. Your driver takes each of you to Menara and walks you to the terminal doors.