Not even the cold of Fes prepared me for what was to face Jenni and I when we hired a car and drove south. Snow, and plenty of it. In one of the towns along the way, where we fancied we might stay the night, we asked at the town hotel if we could see a room. Only afternoon but already bitterly cold, a scraggy-looking man peeled himself away from his coffee to show us where we might sleep.
The room smelled of decay, and when Jenni pointed at a colonial-period radiator and asked if it worked, he shrugged unconvincingly and said, "yes". We decided that between the road winding through the snowy mountain range between us and the next town, and a night in a cold, damp room above a cafe, we would take the high road. So off we set, me nervously twiddling my hair as I tried not to think of a night by a roadside while wild barbary apes rattled at our windows, teeth bared.
With dusk falling, we emerged across the Middle Atlas mountains to find a dry plain, cactus lining the roadside, the ground yellow dust and the rare buildings we came across made from the same sandy stone. It looked from the inside of the car as if it would be scorching hot outside, but it was, at 1500 metres above sea level, the same bitter freezing air that had followed us across the snowy mountains.
Up ahead, like a film set backdrop totally incongruous to the arid landscape we now found ourselves in, was a line of magnificent peaks that continued to belittle and inspire me throughout our whole stay.
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