Walking wide-eyed through the labyrinthine streets of Fez the sights and sounds are mind-boggling. The enormous, ancient medina (walled city) dates back to the 8th century and was Morocco's capital until 1925. From the darkened hours of early morning the rooftops resound with the mournful wails of the call to prayer. "Allahu Akbar" and variations on the theme echo through loudspeakers from 300 mosques. In the warren of streets below our riad the sound of a man urging on his donkeys drifts up to our window. Every morning I hear his breathless muttering as the poor donkeys carry his load to be delivered to houses and parlours.
In the souk (market), some of which is covered, you enter a maze. Though there are occasional signs to one of the seven babs (giant arched gateways into the old city) or to the many madrasas (including Al-Qarawiyyin, the oldest continuously functioning madrasa in the world, built in AD859) you are likely to get lost within minutes, particularly if you decline a guide as we did.
The hustle from locals is constant but easily deflected. They want you to go to the tanneries.
From terraces you look down onto the main tannery where goat skins are plunged into vats of sticky liquid containing pigeon and bat droppings, then dipped in brightly coloured dyes. The stench is powerful.
The leather is then stretched, smoothed with a brush and taken by donkey to a hillside above Fez to be dried in the sun where the red and yellow dots of hundreds of damp animal hides are visible from the city.
The leather industry is the city's backbone but in the souk the stalls also sell herbs, spices, perfumes, dates, nuts, oranges, meat, offal and ram's heads with blood dripping from their noses. There are live snails, eels, shark heads, bronze pots, silver, camel-bone jewellery, combs carved from cow horns, shawls, rugs, carpets, musical instruments resembling loots, oils, waxes, pancakes, bread, kebabs, eggs and mobile phones.
"This must be the tech quarter," we joked as we stumbled across cave-like boutiques selling Samsung and Apple products with full accessories. Pausing in a bustling alleyway to take pictures by the red Moroccan flag with its green five-pointed star, a young boy grabs a snail and a woman dressed in Berber clothes samples an olive while the shopkeeper's back is turned.
A man with a dozen live roosters slung over his shoulders, their feet tied together, stops to barter, laying his subdued fowl on the ground.
These are like scenes out of Aladdin, but for local people this is just everyday life.
Although they are fully conversant with the modern world outside the walls, this place will never change. This is a UNESCO World Heritage site but to people from Fez it's just home.Some of the "streets" are simply passages not much wider than the width of your body. Some pass beneath houses, requiring you to stoop low to enter them.
In these passages you see people take out keys to their front doors and disappear inside where narrow stone steps lead up into their houses.
There are no vehicles, no tarmac, just dusty stone tracks rising and falling upon which supplies are pushed on wheeled trolleys or carried on the backs of despondent mules. Schoolgirls in uniform giggle as they walk home from school.
Above it all, on the roof terraces where you eat mouthwatering tagines with couscous or drink tea, thousands of rusting satellite dishes point in the same direction � not Mecca, presumably � and the emerald and turquoise-blue minarets of the mosques stand majestic under blue skies mottled with wisps of cloud. Pigeons flutter upwards away from the advances of the many stray cats.
In the artisan quarter the constant sound of work. Circular grinding wheels and lathes spin round, sanding down metal, bone, marble, ceramics. The men use their feet as well as hands to hold tools in place as they carve and finish the fine details. Weaving looms are worked with foot pedals below as soft lambswool slowly becomes beautifully handcrafted blankets. Silk and cotton are threaded painstakingly into patterned curtains. I avoid the entreaties of the hard-selling merchants and approach the softly-spoken unobtrusive ones to enter into the ancient art of haggling. I employ a trick I have learned: take out the amount of money you are willing to pay and hand it to them. If they seem reluctant, ask for the money back and begin to walk away. It works a treat. Always aim to pay half the asking price � their original quotation is simply a starting point for bargaining.
"Hey, Obama family!" we hear more than once from groups of cheeky lads. We take it as a compliment.
Passing by an intricately patterned mosque, a cleric asks if I am "Musulman" (Muslim) and I say yes so that I can enter to take pictures, greasing his palm with 20 dirhams as I exit. Lying and bribing in this holy place is surely haram but all I can hope is that merciful Allah in his heaven understands the rare sanctity of such photo opportunities and shows forgiveness.