Fes isn’t so much a destination as a feeling, or to be more precise, a time.  Step through one of the magnificent gates of the ancient medina and you immediately find that you have stepped back four centuries.  Stretching before you is a labyrinth of some 30,000 alleys, some of which are only large enough for one person to pass.  They wind under houses, through souks, around 14^th century mosques, and past the doors of half a million Fassis – all in the space of one square mile. 

  A ten minute stroll in to the heart of the medina presents such an overwhelming stimulation of the senses that many visitors find it fascinating and overwhelming at the same time.  The butchers’ shops are arrayed with carcasses hanging from hooks and piles of sheeps heads and entrails casually stacked on the counter. The spice souks offer a refreshing escape with their pyramids of colourful tumeric, chilli, and henna.  The potters and leather merchants sit on stools outside their closet-sized shops, chatting lazily and sipping the national drink, throat-burningly sweet mint tea. Women in jellabas and head scarves stroll by carrying loaves of unbaked bread to the communal wood-fired ovens or buckets and towels if en route to the hammam, the public baths.  Then there are the hanoots that either stock a dazzling array of goods or three seemingly-incongruous articles like dishrags, fresh mint, and 20kg sacks of flour.  Next to the hanoot there might be a tailor hunched over his embroidery or a man of indeterminate age sharpening knives on a spinning whetstone operated by his wiry leg and a bicycle pedal.

Turn in any direction, take a black and white photograph and it will be impossible to tell if it was taken last week or last century.  Take a colour photo to capture the pure sunlight filtering through the palm frond mats overhead onto the stacks of crimson and amber Berber carpets.  But there is no way to capture the whole experience - its heady smells of sandalwood and drying sheepskins, the shrieks of the playing children and braying donkeys, the jostling of the old women and carefree teenagers with mobile phones attached to their ears.  It is frantic, surreal, sensual, and unlike anywhere else on earth.