We hired a guide in Fes and toured its medina, the oldest part of the city enclosed by ancient fortified walls. Over 200,000 people live and work in the medina, one of the few surviving medieval Arabic cities. To quote the Rough Guide for Morocco, Fez is a place that stimulates your senses with haunting and beautiful sounds, infinite visual details and unfiltered odors, and it seems to exist suspended in time somewhere between the Middle Ages and the modern world. We spent another day exploring Fez and its plethora of carpet shops but the real highlight for me was visiting a hamman, a public bath. For sixty cents you can sweat up a storm, get scrubbed down and massaged, and finally doused with buckets of hot and cold water.
Sexes are, of course, segregated and a surprising amount of modesty prevails.
For example, the men bathe in their underwear or swimming trunks. Unlimited quantities of scalding hot and icy cold water was available but being without glasses in the steamy rooms, I kept getting the buckets mixed up. Being warm to the core and totally clean felt exquisite after several nights in the tent where the condensation on the rain fly froze by morning. We drove inland across the Middle and High Atlas mountains to get peak at the Sahara. The passes were filled with snow which was about the last thing I expected to see in this part of the world.