A riad in Marrakech + a trek in the High Atlas

The riad turns its back on the street. This is the first thing to understand about Marrakech: the grand houses of the medina present blank walls to the lanes outside and save everything for the courtyard within — a fountain, a lemon tree, tilework cooled by shade, the sky held in a rectangle overhead. You arrive through a low door off an alley too narrow for a car, and the noise of the souk drops away in a single step. Breakfast is msemen and mint tea on the roof, the call to prayer crossing the rooftops and the Atlas showing white on the southern horizon. Those mountains are where the second half of the trip lives. Ninety minutes by road brings you to Imlil, a walnut-shaded village at around 1,700 metres where the tarmac gives out and the mule tracks begin. From here the High Atlas rises through terraced fields of barley and cherry, past Berber hamlets of packed earth the colour of the hills they stand on. You walk with a local guide and often a muleteer, sleep in a gîte or a mountain refuge, and eat tagine cooked slowly over gas as the temperature drops. Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa at 4,167 metres, stands within reach for the fit, though the walking rewards well below the summit. What makes the pairing worth the journey is the completeness of the contrast. In two or three days you move from the sensory saturation of the medina — leather, saffron, the metalworkers' quarter, the Jemaa el-Fnaa at dusk — to a silence broken only by water in the irrigation channels and the bells of goats on the slope above. Both are Morocco; neither is complete without the other. Go in spring for wildflowers and snow still on the tops, or in autumn when the walnuts come down. Summer bakes the city and the trekking with it; winter brings real snow to the passes. Treat the mountain days as the anchor and the riad as the reward, or the reverse — the trip holds either way, and asks little more of you than good boots and an appetite.