Memories of Morocco

On the taxi ride from Marrakesh airport to La Palmeraie, Morocco is as I remembered it. Drunk with fatigue, prickling uncomfortably in the humid night air, we drift through an eery, biblical landscape that reeks of rotting garbage, bonfires and abject poverty.

The car's headlights pick out gnarled tree-trunks, some in the middle of the potholed road, and a dusty wasteland where villagers have built nothing much out of mud and corrugated iron.

The thing I'm unprepared for is the culture shock. I don't mean the squalor of the city's grim outskirts, which I experienced as a backpacker here 20 years ago, but the opulence that lies beyond.

As we enter La Palmeraie – a palm grove where luxury hotels grow – the twin turrets of Les Deux Tours loom ahead, and our taxi crunches to an abrupt halt in the gravel.

Inside and alone, we lie on the bed and laugh. Our bedroom is straight out of World of Interiors, with terracotta walls, powder-blue shutters and calico curtains.

Our pink marble bath – the size of a small swimming-pool – is housed in a Moorish brickwork beehive with tiny apertures where the dappled sunlight streams in next day.

The ludicrous thing is, this is just our transit hotel. After two nights here, we'll be whisked away by people-carrier high into the Atlas mountains for a week at La Roseraie.

As its name suggests, this luxury health spa is set in an Edenic rose garden.

It has a gym, a sauna, a hydrotherapy centre, tennis courts and an outdoor pool fed by the melt-waters of the High Atlas. Judging by the Best of Morocco brochure, its rooms have the ambience of a Swiss ski lodge interior-designed by Ali Baba.

As I turn the glossy pages, anticipating a week of unimaginable pampering, two dog-eared sheets of paper slide out on to the floor.

They are photocopies of a French map of the High Atlas, with a spidery route drawn in faded felt-tip pen. "Bus from Asni, 17km, four dirhams," one annotation reads. "Small village with mosque," says another.

At Imelil, a day's hike from the peak of Mount Toubkal, there is more practical advice: "Buy food. Supermarket owned by guy called Lahsen."

It's tragic, I know, but these are relics from my first trip here in 1981, when Nick, a university friend, and I trekked from Asni – a village in the foothills – almost to the summit of North Africa's highest mountain.

I can't imagine how we did it, nor why I have kept the map, packed it with the guidebooks and brought it with me.

Maybe my partner Naomi and I will go walking in the High Atlas this time, or perhaps I'm just curious to know how closely we are following in the footsteps of my past.

That journey back in the 1980s began the day we met Omar, a wiry youth with a waxed moustache who waited with canine devotion outside the Hotel Foucauld each day, and appointed himself as our guide.

During our first few days in Marrakesh, he did all the things guides are meant to do. He took us to his uncle's carpet factory, where we bought a "Berber" rug mass-produced in polyester.

And once we were almost arrested when Omar sent us deep into the kasbah to pick up some hashish from an address scribbled on a scrap of paper.

Having won our confidence, Omar suggested we pay a visit to his family at a village in the Atlas foothills.

It was a "typical" Moroccan hamlet, he said, with the kind of ethnic charm few tourists are likely to encounter.

We arrived by bus at a cluster of shanty-town dwellings with, surreally, a gritty football-pitch at its centre.

With unconcealed pride, Omar showed us the Berber food market – a butcher's stall where elaborate displays of cows' intestines and other vital organs hung outside on hooks, wrapped in red nylon.

Omar's parents lived in comparative luxury in a small farmhouse two km outside the village, and we spent the afternoon mumbling to them in O-level French and smoking kiff – hashish – from tiny clay pipes.

Somehow, we couldn't shake Omar off – but we hatched a plan that might have the required repellent effect.

We explained to Omar, in his flowing djellaba and flimsy yellow moccasins, that we wanted to go trekking in the High Atlas, outlining an off-puttingly adventurous itinerary.

"Don't worry," he beamed, "I will come with you."

So together we boarded the bus to Asni.

It was a bus only in the technical sense: a long, four-wheeled vehicle with an engine and seats.

In comfort terms, it was a cattle-wagon, with a noisy retinue of goats, sheep and cockerels boarding at every stop along the way. This bus went anywhere the driver wanted, carefully avoiding those places marked with a bus-stop sign.

In Asni, the real adventure began.

Unfurling his French map (the very one I am looking at now), Omar pointed to the English instructions which had clearly been written by some other backpacker.

"Bus from Asni, 17km, four dirhams," he falteringly read – but when we asked in one of the many trekkers' cafés, we were told that the bus made the journey to Imelil only once a day.

Undaunted, Omar flagged down a cattle-truck full of livestock and grinning Berbers. We stood in the back, clinging on for dear life as the driver threw his vehicle into a slalom of sharp bends.

At Tagadirt Ait Ali, the road straightened and followed the riverbed at the foot of a steep ravine; vertiginous mountains soared on both sides.

Stepping off the truck at Imelil an hour later, Nick was sick in the gutter next to Lahsen's supermarket.

Scarcely into the foothills, he was suffering from altitude sickness.

We stayed the night at the Refuge Imelil, in the daunting shadow of Mount Toubkal, where Omar cooked us a breakfast of tomato and onions with a fried egg floating on top, and a milky coffee aromatic with cardamom.

It was 4 am, time to start our hike, and Nick was the colour of pesto sauce. As we put on our walking boots and slung bottles of water from our rucksacks, we noticed distant pinpoints of light moving along the mountain ridges near the village of Around.

These were Berber shepherds with blazing torches, making their way up Toubkal.

Armed with our map, we followed them in the dawn light – for once, blissfully without Omar. He had other tourists to harass back in Marrakesh.

An hour into our walk, scrambling up a track of boulders and scree, we came across a group of Berber children in traditional dress, their shaved heads stained purple with iodine to kill headlice.

These Berberettes seemed friendly, and kept on making gestures as if inviting us to drink.

"Thé, thé," one of them was saying, and even we knew this was the French for "tea". Did they want tea, or were they offering it?

Eventually, we were led to a grassy ledge cut in the hillside, where the eldest boy pointed to a cow. "Du lait," he said, tugging at its udders. We were English, so we must surely want milk in our tea.

Soon, the children were showing us how to milk the animal – and the novelty was appealing.

Some of them laughed so much they could scarcely stand up. The atmosphere was so benign, we asked if we could pitch our tent nearby and stay the night on their land.

One of the boys went off to ask. Minutes later, his father appeared and invited us back to his hut. We were his special guests, he said in French, and he wanted to cook us a traditional Berber feast.

The couscous, though generous, was made from the cuts of meat we'd seen hanging in Omar's home village.

Nick surreptitiously shovelled his on to my already overcrowded plate.

After a night of abattoir dreams, we ascended the last few kilometres up steps hewn from the mountain.

Occasionally, we stumbled across a tiny mosque hanging from the rockface, or a bizarre shop selling sunglasses and plastic trinkets, eventually arriving at a plateau just below Toubkal's peak.

The air was cool and clear at that altitude, and we slaked our thirst with ice-cold water from mountain springs.

This was what climbing was all about. As it grew dark, we pitched our tent and decided to climb the last few hundred feet in the clear light of early morning.

That way, we'd have spectacular views across the rosy sands of the Sahara.

Within minutes, it began to hail – great balls of ice that clattered down on the taut canvas and threatened to punch holes in it.

Gathering up our belongings, we scurried off to the Refuge Nelzer, the last mountain hut before the summit – half the height of Everest.

Cold and demoralised, we spent another uneasy night and poked our heads out next morning into an icy gale.

For hours we waited for the wind to stop, knowing we couldn't climb the last metres along a knife-edge ridge without being blown off and hurled to a gory death.

Finally, at noon, we packed our rucksacks and headed home.

As our MPV passes the familiar turn-off to Imelil, I look back on that first journey and feel pathetic – not because we failed, but because I remember the whole excursion with such clarity.

I prefer not to wallow in the past, but can we ever escape the past?

Just as I am reflecting on this, we turn into the driveway of La Roseraie and notice the futuristic dome of the hydrotherapy centre.

Waving from the steps is a masseur in a white tunic, a wiry man with a waxed moustache. He looks like someone I know, someone very like him. He looks uncannily like Omar.

- INDEPENDENT