Fez smells like leather and rose water and centuries. The tanneries — the Chouara, operating since the 11th century — are still there, the workers in the pits up to their thighs in pigeon dung and dye, the skins stretched on rooftops to dry in the sun. The leather shops that ring the tanneries provide sprigs of mint to hold under your nose. You hold the mint and look down from the balcony at something that has not changed in a thousand years of continuous human industry.

The Medinas

The medinas of Fez and Marrakech are different animals.

Fez's medina is the largest car-free urban area in the world — 9,000 narrow lanes, some barely a shoulder-width, carrying all the functions of a living city: groceries, metalwork, schooling, religion, arguments, love affairs, death. You will get lost. This is not a failure. This is how the medina works. The city is not organized for outsiders to navigate but for insiders to live in, and navigating it means accepting that you're reading a language you don't know yet.

Marrakech's medina is more organized for the tourist economy — more English, more aggressive touts, more explicit destinations like the Djemaa el-Fna square, which at dusk becomes one of the most extraordinary urban spectacles on earth: snake charmers (there are always snake charmers), storytellers (in Arabic, to audiences of locals who laugh at things you don't catch), food stalls serving merguez and harira and orange juice pressed before your eyes, and a general roar that rises as the temperature drops.

Driving South

Between Marrakech and the Sahara lies the High Atlas, the Draa Valley, the Dades Gorge, and about seven hours of some of the most dramatic landscapes in Africa. I rented a car and drove it over two days, stopping in Aït Benhaddou — the mud-brick ksar used as a filming location so many times it's become a film set that happens to be a real historical site — and Ouarzazate, the "Hollywood of Morocco," before continuing south into the palmeries of the Draa.

The Draa Valley is a line of green following the river through an otherwise ochre landscape. Mud-brick villages, date palms, occasional camels. The further south you go, the quieter it gets. By the time you reach Zagora, you feel the desert pulling.

The Dunes

The Erg Chebbi dunes near Merzouga rise 150 meters from the flat desert floor. They're stunning in the way that things are stunning when they're exactly as advertised: the photographs are accurate, the scale is real, the sunset turns them from orange to crimson to purple with textbook predictability.

The thing no photograph communicates is the silence. Not the sound of silence — actual silence, the kind you find when there's no wind and nothing alive within earshot and the nearest road is thirty kilometers away. I sat at the top of a dune in that silence for an hour and heard my own heartbeat.

What to Eat

• Bastilla: Pigeon (or chicken) in flaky pastry, dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon. It tastes like a feud between sweet and savory, which you want.
• Mechoui: Whole slow-roasted lamb, bought by weight from specialist stalls in the medina
• Msemen: Flaky flatbread, eaten with argan oil and amlou (almond-argan paste) for breakfast
• Harira: The tomato-lentil soup that breaks the Ramadan fast; available year-round and essential on cold evenings

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Haggling is expected and part of the social contract of the souks. Enjoy it. The opening price is a starting position, not an insult.