I traveled to Marrakech, Morocco not long ago, with my brother Charles, who is a fine photographer. We spent days, painstakingly setting up shots: framing them up, assessing the light, taking turns in the view finder and finally, inventing covert ways in which to include people in the background without upsetting them. Many demand money; others believe a piece of their soul is lost when this image is reproduced.The Marrakech Medina is a visual feast. Each narrow street is a frenzied tangle of life - Donkey carts piled high with pots, venders trying to seduce you into their stalls with sweet mint tea, blind men soliciting alms, bicycles, scooters, fortune tellers, story tellers, snake charmers, pickpockets, mad men and hustlers of every kind.

The souks are an emporium of art and craft, every square foot is a billboard of treasures for sale: silver tea pots, lamps, plates, items made of terracotta, bronze, and leather, carpets, mosaics and tapestries of vibrant colours and design. A bare spot on a Moroccan wall means that something was just sold. Vivid colours also flood the marketplace in the mounds of oranges, saffron, pickled lemons, olives, dried apricots, figs, pistachios and sweet meats. The colours are so overwhelming, the beauty so obvious, so simple.

The sounds of the Medina are distinctive. Resounding endlessly throughout the city is: the snake charmers “ghaitah” which sounds like a lonely oboe and the trance healers, who beat hypnotic rhythms with iron hammers and tall drums.

The most distinctive sound is that of the “call to prayer”, an ominous voice that comes from the mosque, resonates through the city five times day and night, instructing the faithful to kneel to prayer, and prayer is all encompassing, activities cease, carpets are unrolled. All but the women flock to the mosques. The call to prayer does not sound like it comes from a human voice, but Allah himself speaking on a bad sound system.

The odour of the main square, Djemaa El Fna is a very unusual, heavy smell, sharp, smoky and somehow sweet. It permeates your clothing and gets in your hair. This stinging scent infuses everything you buy or touch and stays with you for weeks even after you’re home. The smell of leather cured with camel dung is not unpleasant, and never goes away.

We enjoyed with an English couple in the square one evening, a Moroccan dinner served “Tapas” style with shared platters. We started with buns and a Moroccan salad of cilantro and tomatoes, a dish of olives and French fries. The antipasto salad included spinach, stuffed eggplant and two other vegetables unknown to us. They kept bringing us plates of food and since we couldn’t remember what we had ordered, each plate was a surprise. The kebabs arrived and after that, the calamari. Shrimp and white fish followed. We enjoyed our meal with bottled water and mint tea, alcohol not allowed. This meal, like a one-stop progressive feast was as much about culture as it was about food.

I struck up a conversation with a middle aged Moroccan man, who spoke some English. He shared with me one of his culture’s basic principals; that the carpet is the foundation of the home, upon which everything else is built. Carpets are the currency of Morocco, traded in the Souks, blanketing their houses. “First,” he said, “you must get a wife. Second, you get a carpet.”

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