When I told our six-year-old we were going on holiday to Africa, he pulled a face. “But I want to go back to the Leonardo!” Which was not the precocious little twerp asking to be Eurostarred directly to the Louvre, but rather a request for a return visit to the chain business hotel next to Brighton station we’d stayed in at half-term — which, to be fair to Alasdair, did do a very solid breakfast buffet.
The point being, does it make any sense to drag your kids — in our case, Alasdair, six, and Nancy, three — round some “exotic land of contrasts” when all they might remember is the omelette station and unlimited Coco Pops? Well, I wanted to go back to a country I fell in love with as a 19-year-old backpacker, so my wife and I risked it: nine days in Morocco in the Easter hols.
Carrie Johnson, the current wife of the former prime minister, just had a similar idea. Her reliably entertaining Instagram shows her dragging her kids, sans Boris, from Marrakesh to the Atlas mountains to what looks like the Agafay desert. Which was eerily similar to our trip to Marrakesh, the Atlas mountains and the Agafay desert, though we tacked on a couple of nights at the seaside in Essaouira. If I see her selfie-ing from a Leonardo, I’ll know to start worrying.
Was it better than my month-long student backpacking odyssey? Of course it wasn’t. But it was very wonderful in its own souk-bothering, mule-trekking, camel-riding, eye-opening, memory-making way. And the breakfasts, says Alasdair, were awesome.
When our taxi pulled up outside a noisy backstreet motorcycle repair shop in Marrakesh, I had a mild flashback to some of the lower moments of my 2002 trip. True, on our 20-minute ride from the airport, I’d already been able to point out grazing camels, swaying palm trees and a family of four squeezed onto a single moped. But was this the moment our driver would gently, then more aggressively, ask for a few extra dirhams to take us to our real hotel?
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But no. Wooden doors to the left of the garage opened on to an oasis of calm and sophistication: Villa des Orangers, a swanky converted riad with pool, whose calm and sophistication was immediately ruined by my children, who, to be fair, had been up since 3am. Noise really does bounce round a riad. But they were impressed.
Back in the day, I stayed in one £4.50-a-night riad, in Meknes, where the showerhead dribbled down directly over the (shared) squat toilet; it cost 50p extra for hot water. Villa des Orangers was not like that, and turned out to be an easy base for an evening in the Djemaa el-Fna square — where Alasdair was, quite rightly, very suspicious of the snake charmers and monkeys on chains. (We resisted the touristified, identical grill stalls and instead had a cheap, hassle-free dinner at Snack Toubkal on the square’s edge.)
As tourist cities go, Marrakesh is quite vibe-based, to use the modern parlance. By which I mean there aren’t loads of sights and museums to tick off. This is good when you have a three-year-old and didn’t pack the buggy. There’s the Koutoubia mosque to stare up at and, unless you’re Muslim, not enter. We paid too much for a taxi to Yves St Laurent’s blue-painted, cactus-filled Jardin Majorelle, where we padded round with the Instagrammers who’ve taken it over (didn’t see Carrie; £13, booking essential; jardinmajorelle.com). Alasdair and Nancy liked the frogs by the pond, then needed a poo at the same time, which is the stuff treasured family memories are made of. We got at least one cute photograph of our children to WhatsApp back to Grandma.
Our express tour of the souks with our guide, Omar Nidlassri, was a good way to see them, in that we didn’t get lost, and didn’t have much time for Alasdair and Nancy to break some poor artisan’s handicrafts by not “looking with their eyes” only.
My wife had been to Morocco once before and found some of the men a bit “starey”. Not any more! We learnt of this bonus from the trip notes our tour operator, the family-adventure specialist Stubborn Mule, had supplied. Yep, women travelling on their own can get grief … but not wizened old hags who’ve evidently had babies. Result! Omar told us that if they don’t have their own, women often borrow someone else’s kid while they do their shopping. In addition, we had a secret haggling weapon: little blonde Nancy, who seemed to melt the hearts of even the gnarliest traders.
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Back to the hotel for “vibes” — at the pool and again over breakfast. Up on our roof terrace, amid traffic noise and the call to prayer, with the snow-spread Atlas mountains visible through the heat haze to the south, it was — Tim Spector look away now — a sultan’s spread of carbs and sugar: croissants, pancakes, jam, honey, mint tea. Thumbs up from Al and Nance.
On our 90-minute taxi ride to those snow-spread mountains, the temporary tent city outside the market town of Asni revealed that all is not back to normal here after September’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake. According to our driver, the government is still prioritising repairing roads ahead of rehousing people.
Higher into the foothills, Imlil seemed to have largely bounced back. I’d been to this little town once before, on a separate trip to climb Mount Toubkal, north Africa’s highest mountain. None of that strenuous nonsense this time. Rather a six-mile-ish trek without the “are we nearly there yets”, because the under-sevens were travelling by mule. Nancy did take some persuading. Persuasion came in the form of Hassan Ouasmi, our mule-wrangler, losing patience, hoicking her up and plonking her next to her brother.
They loved it. I loved it less when Marhaba the mule ambled perilously close to a sheer drop as a Dacia Duster raced past — but these helicopter parents were here to get out of their comfort zone, right?
Our guide, Said Agafay, led us to his village to share some couscous with his wife and young daughter. I say “share”…
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A note on travelling during Ramadan: you, and especially your kids, may want to eat when the locals can’t (ie at a sensible time). Whether you let your kids stuff biscuits in their faces in the back of some poor famished driver’s taxi is a decision for you.
• Why a trip to Morocco’s oldest city was my family’s best holiday yet
It looks like Carrie stayed in Imlil at the Berber Family Lodge; we were down the road in the equally homely, treehousey Dar Imlil, where, after some high-intensity games of Dobble in the spring sunshine, we were all tucked up under our Berber blankets by 8pm. Mountain air, early nights and no booze for half a week: I was already feeling the benefit.
On my 2002 trip, I made it all the way to the Sahara, which took a whole night to reach by bus. My auberge in Merzouga echoed with the sounds of middle-aged European women getting a very particular sort of private tour from their much younger Berber “guides”. I hadn’t shared this passage from my autobiography with Stubborn Mule, but nevertheless they suggested our time might be better spent in Agafay, which doesn’t have the big dunes of the desert proper, more rocks and dust and a silver mine. But it does have starry nights and camel rides, and is less than an hour’s drive from Marrakesh.
We were, and I apologise, glamping. Our bijou Bedouin set-up at Scarabeo Camp included double beds, deep duvets, a hot shower and our own (chemical) loo. The feel was colonial grand tourist (don’t cancel us!) and it was, unsurprisingly, very hot. There was a chilly pool, pétanque — and beer! Wind and dust meant the promise of a sky full of stars was not met, but we’ll always have our pre-dinner camel ride. We only went up the road and back, my wife and Nancy in front, me and Alasdair riding behind, dodging tourists on quad bikes, but those 45 minutes are already the stuff of primary-school playground bragging rights.
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Then to the seaside, at the fishing port of Essaouira, which, in everyone’s opinion, knocked Brighton into a cocked fez. Had it changed or had I changed? The wind-blown Atlantic beachfront was tidier and more salubrious than I remembered it from 22 years ago. The whitewashed hippy hangout of Jimi Hendrix and the like has certainly suffered a degree of hipsterisation — get your proper coffee from Kesh Cup, your dukkah-fried chicken at the Loft and a fish burger from Fishburger. They even filmed some of Game of Thrones here. We did some light haggling for a marquetry jewellery box and a trendy green vase (very Oliver Bonas). And, in a stolen hour without the fam, I got ripped off for the one and only time of the trip (you know who you are, old barber dude with bad teeth).
As the sun set beyond the ramparts, I got the poignant sense that an adventure was coming to a close, and — looking at Alasdair and Nancy, trying to stay awake to finish their pizzas on the balcony of Restaurant Il Mare — a wave of realisation that I was very much not 19 any more.
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From here we returned to Marrakesh, the plan being to recover from our adventure by a pool in a posh hotel in the suburbs. We probably didn’t need recovery to be honest. It had all been pretty straightforward really, and … fun. Still, we forced ourselves to enjoy the lobster rolls and the wine list and the fluffy dressing gowns and the obscene breakfast buffet (just the eight varieties of honey) at the gleaming, Indian-owned Oberoi. We even stuck the children in the kids’ club for a bit, and got a babysitter, so we could get a bit pissed under the stars.
But as we ploughed through the fine-dining tasting menu, in a marble courtyard based on the city’s Ben Youssef Madrassa, in my mind I was trailing behind Marhaba the mule on a trail in the Atlas mountains, a six-year-old and a three-year-old on their own African odyssey, quiet and grinning, forgetting they had a mum and dad traipsing behind them in the dust.
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I hope Nancy and Alasdair also remember how happy they were bobbing along on Marhaba’s back. I hope one day they go back with a backpack. But I’d want more than the one 20-minute phone call home my mum got.
Martin Hemming was a guest of Villa des Orangers (half-board doubles from £320; villadesorangers.com), the Oberoi Marrakesh (B&B doubles from £698; oberoihotels.com) and Stubborn Mule, which can tailor-make seven nights’ B&B in mid-range accommodation from £1,400pp, including flights, transfers, some activities and some extra meals (stubbornmuletravel.com)
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