Tight corners, dizzying bends… and a calming glass of mint tea

Sarah Rodrigues takes a tour of Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains in a vintage motorcycle sidecar

Iknew that the rider responsible for zipping me about Marrakech in a vintage sidecar had arrived: the flat cap, boots and cravat were a dead giveaway. “Felix?” I smiled tentatively. “One minute – I’ll just grab my stuff.”

He smiled back and gestured around the courtyard, through which morning light was angling. “Not a problem – I could look at this all day.”

He had a point. I was being collected from the Oberoi, which opened in 2019 and has an exclusive partnership with the local motorbike travel operation Marrakech Insiders. The hotel is a lavish confection of palace-inspired architecture and shimmering water features – the intricate carvings and mosaics of the courtyard and adjoining lobby alone took 200 artisans two years to create.

In such a setting, it is easy to forget that you are in Marrakech, a city that assaults every one of your senses, no matter how many times you have visited. But whizzing along in a vintage motorcycle sidecar is a sure-fire way to plonk yourself firmly back in the realities of the destination – which is, after all, the point of travelling, isn’t it?

Granted, not all of these realities were welcome. On my first ride,

I noticed that piles of rubbish and plastic bottles were all the more conspicuous at street level, as were the lethargy of street dogs and the piteous faces of scrawny stray cats. From the sidecar, I could have scooped them all up had they not skittered away on our rumbling approach.

In many other settings, the roar of the bike might have made me feel self-consciously intrusive, but this Moroccan city throbs with a thousand engines. Here, I was just another passenger – albeit one comfortably ensconced in a leather-seated bubble, with my legs stretched out in front of me. That said, it took a couple of hours to get accustomed to the sensation as I braced myself for every approaching pothole. The traffic seemed far madder than it had when I’d been a pedestrian, and turns and roundabouts felt, at first, horribly counterintuitive – but it was soon abundantly clear that I was in the hands of an expert. And without having to concentrate on when to tense or lean as a pillion rider, I was able simply to observe.

The ride with Felix was the first of a week’s worth, arranged by Marrakech Insiders, and as the days drew on, it became clear that “Insiders” was no mere window dressing. Every single one of the riders and guides I encountered was so irresistibly warm and affable that, despite venturing into territories rarely seen by tourists, I never felt unwelcome (quite the opposite: hugs and handshakes were the norm). They also brought with them an astounding knowledge of – and access to – locations far beyond what most travellers would experience.

Felix, for example, pulled over on the road just outside Tameslohte – a town about a 30-minute ride from Marrakech, dotted with mausoleums – and pointed to a kasbah in the distance. “I knew there was something about this place,” he said. “Its size, its position… I just kept knocking every time I was in the area until someone let me in.”

His hunch about the kasbah was spot-on: having fallen into the hands of multiple inheritors, not all of whom were aligned on the question of what to do with it, certain sections remained off-limits, but the areas to which we did have access were extraordinary. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had played in its column-flanked central courtyard in the 1990s, while upstairs, light filtered through colourful Iranian glass into a passageway leading to an intricately tiled, cushion-stuffed salon. We removed our shoes to sit in this jewel box of a room and drank mint tea – accompanied by a bold pigeon, who helped himself to biscuit crumbs from Felix’s hand.

From Tameslohte, we drove further out into the pale-yellow moonscape of the Agafay desert, where several quad bike operations and luxury tented camps had set up shop, while camels rested yogically on the sand, awaiting their next passenger. In the distance, we could make out the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas Mountains, and closer in, the austerity of the landscape was broken by the occasional swathe of oasis greenery – lusher than usual thanks to the heavy rain that had fallen the previous week.

Marrakech and its surrounds seem to have long inspired creative types and dreamers. Here, those with crazy ideas find not only the tolerance such ideas require, but also the physical space in which to actualise them. Among those we experience are the artists’ residency, studios and gallery of the Jardin Rouge (montresso.com/en/jardin-rouge) and the mindbending villa and sculpture park of Dar El Sadaka (darelsadaka. com), where French visual artist JeanFrançois Fourtou toys with perception in a 25-acre estate, that can only be visited via exclusive hire – or, of course, with a Marrakech Insider.

Meanwhile, the palm groves of the 1,000-year-old Palmeraie – once responsible for most of the city’s produce – are now the Beverly Hills of Marrakech, featuring luxurious homes. We took the motorbike and sidecar to visit an art-deco gem owned by a socialite family who had hosted the likes of Yves Saint Laurent at countless parties. The walls bear witness to these glamorous events, as well as to the work of Leila Alaoui, the couple’s acclaimed photographer daughter, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Burkina Faso in 2016.

After negotiating the tight corners and dizzying bends of the city – taking in lesser-known corners of the medina and the broad streets and French influences of the Gueliz neighbourhood in Marrakech’s new town – we rode, on my final day, into the expanse of the Atlas Mountains. As we stopped for a breakfast of brochettes in a local market, schoolchildren waved; some blocked the road with cheeky dances.

“You’re famous now,” laughed that day’s guide, Mounir. My face obscured by a helmet, sunglasses and bandana, I decided that I had obviously been mistaken for Madonna – who booked out an entire lodge in the Agafay desert for her 60th birthday.

As we climbed higher into the mountains, scrubby roadside plants gave way to gracious cedars and eucalyptus trees. Goats defied gravity as they scampered off the road. Far beneath us, fold upon fold of pale pinks, yellows and apricots created an indecipherable pattern of civilisation – as inscrutable as the ancient red markings on the wall of an open-sided tunnel, reached via a steep scramble, high above the Berber village where we had been welcomed for a tagine in the home of the local chief. In the vastness and simplicity of that setting, identity – real or imagined – fell away: it was difficult to imagine that, by the time night fell, we would be back in the frenzy and blur of the city, and the warm embrace of the Oberoi.

Sarah Rodrigues was a guest of the Oberoi, Marrakech (00 212 05250 81515; oberoihotels.com), located six miles from the medina in 28 acres of grounds studded with citrus and olive trees. Deluxe rooms cost from £709 per night, including private terrace, 24-hour private butler service and breakfast. Marrakech Insiders (00 212 06696 99374; marrakechinsiders.com) offers rides from £152 for 1½ hours, for a maximum two passengers