Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

Every Tuesday, the people from the small villages on the slopes of the High Atlas mountains, come down to the city of Amizmiz. Here they sell their goods and shop for the necessities for the week to come. For the past few weeks we've been living just half an hour from Amizmiz and we've enjoyed visiting the busy weekly market with its farmers, traders, weavers, and ceramists. The people of the Amazigh (what outsiders call the Berbers) are the descendants of the pre-Arab population of the Sahara, and Amazigh culture stretches back at least 4000 years.  They created several kingdoms before the Arabs made their conquests in the 7th century. During the following centuries of Islamization,  the language and the culture of the Amazigh almost disappeared until the French took over Morocco just before the first World War. The French used the distinction between the Arab majority and the indigenous people in the mountains as a way of  'Dividin...

  When Michael and I plan our travels, I'm always looking forward to the cooking. I love making meals inspired by what you see and taste in a local market. I cooked in Hanoi, on Bali, in the favela in Rio, in Paris. I try to cook everywhere, having my own take on some of the local dishes. Here, in the Moroccan riad, I wanted to do the same at least a few times a week, but I soon found out even relative simpel cooking is difficult to plan, when you're living way out in a desert.  You can't pop into a local shop, whenever you find out you need an ingredient. Here every buy has to be planned ahead and brought home by taxi. But still, I needed to try my hands in a Moroccan kitchen and I asked Fatima, a local cook, who was hired to make most of our meals, if I could help her preparing. The common way of cooking in the Berber communities, has for many centuries been doing tagines - dishes named after the earthenware pot in which they are cooked A tagine consist...

The sun is setting on our first day in Morocco. The Mu'addhin has just recited the Adhan, the call for prayer, from the pink minaret of the village mosque about two hundred yards away. - La ilaha, ill llah, muhammadun rasulu llah. There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. The almost wailing voice marks that the day is about to end. We now live in Tizfrite, a small Berber village on the vast Saharan desert plain that stretches towards the High Atlas Mountains. Here, we're planning to stay for the next month, but this year has taught us that plans can change! We should actually have started 2018 with three months in Hong Kong. Everything was planned, the air tickets bought, the flat in Hong Kong rented, our flat in Copenhagen sublet. And then  I had a nasty fall, which almost destroyed my knee. Instead of strolling through Chinese alleys and markets, we went to our house in the south of France, where I ...