As I look over my photos of Fes, I am struck by what a forbidding place it must seem. Closed doors. Windowless walls. Toothed rooflines. Narrow alleys. A sullen yellow color scheme. On the surface, Marrakech seemed more welcoming, but Marrakech’s welcome is that of a smiling salesman who’s hoping to part you from your cash. Fes feels more genuine.

We spent most of our time in the medina, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With its thousands mostly unnamed streets and alleyways, it is an easy place to get lost in. But maybe “lost” is the wrong word. When you don’t have a specific destination and are there to see what is to be seen, you can’t ever be truly lost. We did, however, misplace our accommodations (the Dar Sondos Guesthouse) more than once.

And so we wandered through the melancholy and secrets of the medieval streets.

I like leather — belts, shoes, straps, accents. One of my favorite possessions, in fact, is a heavy leather overnight bag made by Saddleback Leather and gifted to me by a very good friend. It weighs a ton. It takes a good three minutes to open or close. It’s wildly impractical compared to all the lightweight many-pocketed overnight bags other people have. But I love it for its style and durability.

As much as I appreciate good leather, I had never given much thought to how it’s made. At a tannery in Fes, I got an education.

When the animal skins come in, they are first soaked in vats of pigeon shit. The ammonia released by the guano softens the leather.

Next the pieces are placed in dyeing vats to produce the desired color.

The pieces are stomped on by workers inside the vats to work the dye into the leather. Finally, the skins are removed and left out to dry.

It’s smelly, dirty work. We were given sprigs of mint to hold under our noses as we walked through. The workers, though, had no such comfort, let alone health and safety gear. The process and the facility seem to be centuries old. I still love my leather, but I now have a new appreciation of the work that goes into it.

While Marrakech is unabashedly touristy, Fes is more reserved. Its medina is said to have 9,700-some streets and alleys. Some of these are so narrow that one has to angle one’s shoulders slightly sideways to pass. The signs and graffiti on the medina walls are down-home and aimed at locals, not tourists.

The road ended in Zagora. Spencer and I met up with a Berber guide and two camels, who were to be our rides into the desert.

On a signal from our guide, the camels lay down, folding their legs flat under them. We climbed on our camels, sitting slightly behind the hump on top of some saddle blankets. A metal handhold was affixed to a strap that ran around the animal’s underside. We held on, and at a signal from our guide, the camels stood up. Quickly. Our guide lashed our gear to the straps that secured the saddle blankets, and we were off.

The foothills of the Atlas range soon gave way to relatively flat desert sand. It was already late afternoon when we started off, and soon we were treated to the rise of the full moon from behind the hills. It bathed the desert in light bright enough to cast shadows.

Eventually, we came to a Berber encampment that consisted of about a half-dozen tents made from sewn-together pieces of burlap. Some other travelers joined us there. This was our home for the night.

While the outside wasn’t much to look at, the insides were positively luxurious. Our beds were enormous and were covered with heavy blankets that kept us warm even in the cold desert night. A solar panel provided electricity for a small lightbulb, but that ran out after about three hours.

We had a nice dinner of chicken tagine, followed by an impromptu concert by the Berber guides. I had hoped to see a brilliant spangle of stars in the desert sky, but the moon washed out everything except the very brightest of them.

We got up early the next morning so we could ride in the cooler part of the day. Our transportation awaited us.

We mounted up again and headed back to Zagora. It was a short trek. Too short. Now that I’ve seen what it’s like, I will go longer and deeper into the desert next time.

Traveling by camel is obviously a tourist fantasy. Berbers today are far more likely to take 4x4s into the desert. Despite the contrivance, though, seeing the desert from camelback was a lot more intimate than glimpsing it through a car window. And it was not too difficult to imagine what life must have been like for desert nomads before roads and 4x4s pushed into the Sahara.

From Marrakech, we headed southeast toward the Algerian border. The road took us through the Atlas Mountains, through the town of Ouarzazate, and ended in Zagora, on the edge of the Sahara Desert

The Atlas Mountains were spectacular and much bigger than I had expected. The road turned into a series of switchbacks and the air thinned out.

Along the way, we passed by movie studios where we glimpsed giant sets that could be configured to look like ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, and the modern Middle East.

Bouncing around in the backseat of a 4×4 as we passed over the Atlas range made me a little queasy. I popped some dimenhydrinate, which had the unfortunate side effect of making me sleepy and a little disoriented. We stopped for lunch along the way, but regrettably I didn’t note exactly where we were.

Finally, we descended through a long series of hairpin turns and came to Zagora.

We were here:

I felt generationally obligated to take the train from Casablanca goin’ south.

I met up with my son, Spencer, in the Casablanca airport. It was early evening. We had planned to head to Marrakech immediately, but found we had missed the last train that night, so we bedded down for a few hours at a hotel by the station, got up at oh dark hundred, and boarded the Marrakech Express.

The party, as usual, was on the platform between the coaches.

Once in Marrakech, we threaded our way through the ancient medina to the Riad Layla Rouge, a wonderful hostel with a bright funky decor.

We were here:

Once settled, we set out to see the city.

In contrast to Tunisia, where nearly every building is painted white, nearly every building in Marrakech is colored with a hue that one could describe as rose, salmon, reddish-brown, or clay depending on the light at the time. The effect was handsome and soothing.

As we were obviously tourists, touts and shopkeepers addressed us at every turn. The medina is labyrinthine, and so some people earn tips by guiding lost travelers like us to where they want to go (ideally), or to their uncle’s rug shop (not so ideal). In general, we tolerated this environment with a smile, as if it was all just a big game of commerce. I did, to my regret, lose my temper once with a kid who refused to accept my tip of 20 dirhams (about $2) for walking us ten minutes through the medina. He demanded 100 dirhams and wouldn’t let us be. Marrakech is a major tourist destination, but one that could be even more enjoyable if its citizens dialed back their hard-sell hand-out attitudes.