Red walls, palm trees and the white peaks of the High Atlas on the horizon: that is the first impression of Marrakesh, and on a clear winter morning, with snow on the mountains to the south, it is unforgettable. The city stands on the Haouz plain in central Morocco, a sprawling, noisy, beautiful place of nearly a million people, built around a walled medina that has been a centre of trade and power for close to a thousand years.
Marrakesh was founded in the eleventh century by the Almoravids, Berber rulers from the Sahara, and it gave its name to the whole country in some languages. The Koutoubia mosque, with its tall minaret of pinkish stone, has been the city's landmark for centuries, and the great square of Jemaa el-Fnaa beside the medina comes alive every evening with food stalls, storytellers, musicians, snake charmers and acrobats. The souks are a labyrinth of narrow alleys selling spices, leather, carpets and lanterns, and the old palaces and gardens, among them the Bahia Palace and the Majorelle Garden, are worth a day of their own.
Riding in Marrakesh is an experience. Traffic is dense and anarchic, with scooters, donkey carts, taxis, buses and pedestrians all moving at once and few rules seemingly observed. Roundabouts are a free-for-all. Inside the medina, the streets are narrow and crowded, and riding there is best avoided altogether. Park in a guarded lot and walk. The police are visible, and speed checks on the roads out of the city are common.
As a starting point, though, Marrakesh is superb. The N9 heads southeast toward the Atlas and the Tizi n'Tichka pass, climbing through Berber villages and red valleys to a summit of about 2,260 metres before dropping down to Ouarzazate and the edge of the Sahara. The road has been widened and improved, but expect trucks, sharp bends, rockfalls after rain, and occasional snow closures in winter.
The city has everything you need: fuel, mechanics, hotels from simple riads to luxury palaces, and food everywhere. Try a tagine, slow-cooked in a clay pot, or tanjia, a local speciality of meat cooked for hours in the embers of a bathhouse fire. Fill the tank and carry water before setting off into the mountains; stations become sparse once you leave the plain.