A taste of Islam from Morocco to Spain: So Tasty, It's Moorish

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In late June and July I spent a week and a half travelling across Morocco and into Spain. I was gagging to get away from work and the usual pressures of daily life - fair enough, I had a few days in Tuscany in late June, but it was straight bacm into things on my return and I quickly forgot I had had a break - but this was 'the summer holiday' and a long-awaited chance to spend a full stretch of time just me and Alexis too.

I can't say it was a relaxing break. But it was invigorating, refreshing, different, new, a bit challenging. Since my big trip (as I now refer to my 10 month international jaunt) I have realised just how much decadence, wastage, laziness, and general blahness daily life in a Western country contains, and however hard you try, if you're involved in real life, you can't avoid these things. With almost a year behind me since I came home from the big trip I realised that one of the things I enjoyed most about it and would almost compulsively seek to recreate regularly thereafter, was to throw off as many of the trappings of this decadent way of life as I could. Being on the road, living frugally, staying in crappy hostels, travelling without pre booking very much, turning up somewhere strange and finding your way. It is a decadence all its own. So I was looking to snatch a bit of that back in my Morocco/Spain trip.

In honesty, as I say, you can take the girl out of the Western trappings, but you can't easily take the trappings out of the girl. We had decided to book a couple of nights on each side of the trip in a decent and inexpensive hotel; we were flying into Marrakech and our plan was to spend a couple of nights there, then take the train north to Meknes, north again to Fes, onto Tangier to take the boat to Algeciras in Spain, up on a bus or train to Grenada where we pre-booked a couple of nights in a cheap apartment, and down to Malaga to fly home.

Our route started with flying into Marrakech - a surprisingly small airport, which we flew into over barren expanses of dusty, beige-coloured desert. A bus ride later, we were already lost in the labyrinthine, unamed alleyways around Djamaa El Fna, Marrakech' infamous main square. We'd heard about the 'unofficial guides' that accosted tourists in Marrakech and were fully briefied by some friends who'd been recently that they were very, very persistent. We were ready to brush them off. But we ended up needing the services on a small boy who expertly plyed us into his hands and led us through endless turns and shady, bustling alleys to a dead end which was so small, it was in pitch darkness. A big old door set into the crumbling mudbrick wall was the entrance to a small, perfectly formed riad of just four bedrooms, a tiny courtyard and a little terrace. The July heat in Morocco at this time was blistering, suffocating, and totally zapped any energy I had out of me in seconds: the second you stepped through the door of this riad, the coolness of the air and the quiet was amazing. We were glad of it at the end of each day navigating Marrakech, asking directions in French and taking it all in.

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