After burning through double our budget yesterday, with an e-sim, hammam and hotel meal, today is all about not spending money and just soaking up the atmosphere.

This started with one of my favourite activities – breakfast on the roof of a gorgeous Ryad in the sunshine, with a monumental view over the Fez Medina.

The day followed with over 14km of walking with Mark round the Medina and outside, with a particular highlight being the tanneries. Despite the ever present hassling to enter leather shops because “this is the only way to get into the tanneries”, these tanneries did score slightly higher for me than the ones in Marrakech that we visited over a decade ago. This judgement is based solely on the fact that I left with both my shoes able to be worn again after today. After dropping one converse baseball boot clad foot right into a vat filled with several hundreds of litres of pigeon urine and faeces, the same could not be said at the Marrakech tannery.

Fez Medina is pretty much the textbook definition of a rabbit warren and I would be happily lost in it for days.

Sadly rabies is endemic in Morocco or this little one would be in my pocket by now.

You have no idea how long it takes to wait for a Fez Medina street to be this empty. Normally you will only get run over by one of two carts, if you’re lucky:

…or one avocado cart (genuinely trying to get down this street in the middle of this photo) and a few hundred people, if you’re not. 

Our final stop before heading out for supper was some fancy palatial gates that are equally carved and magnificent as every other building in Fez.

As a group, we start cooking for ourselves after tomorrow, so this was likely one of our last professionally cooked meals. The scores our fellow travellers have given themselves for cooking skills are not high….

As the restaurant was out of chicken pastilla, I had the equally traditional lamb and prune tagine while Mark went for camel. When in Morocco….

The promise of the itinerary changing when necessary is already happening as well. As a Zimbabwean, our truck driver has not been given a visa to Mauritania, so we have a very experienced British driver starting us off through to Dakar. Likewise, our large yellow truck is still in port at Casablanca, so tomorrow we meet our fellow travellers and our large blue truck that will be our home for a few days before we change onto the big yellow one.

Tomorrow, the real adventure starts…..