What are uniquely Moroccan experiences you can’t do elsewhere?

Travellers often ask what's the most 'Moroccan' thing they can do, and I love the question because the answers are things you genuinely can't replicate anywhere else. Top of my list is the Chouara tannery in Fes — looking down from a leather shop's terrace over those honeycomb stone vats of dye, men standing waist-deep working hides exactly as they have for a thousand years, the smell sharp in your nose (they hand you mint to hold). It's medieval, unvarnished and utterly unique; nowhere else on earth shows you a living craft so unchanged.

Then there's Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech, which UNESCO actually recognises as a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage — the storytellers, the Gnaoua musicians, the food carts, the whole nightly carnival is a tradition with no real equivalent. And the Sahara: a night in a camp at Erg Chebbi, camel silhouettes on the dunes, Berber drumming round a fire, the densest stars you'll ever see. Plenty of countries have deserts, but the combination of these towering dunes, the Berber hospitality and the camp ritual is distinctly Moroccan.

Smaller daily rituals count just as much. The traditional hammam — the communal steam, the black soap, the brisk scrub from a stranger, the sense of an ancient shared ceremony — is a cornerstone of Moroccan life you can step into. So is mint tea, 'Berber whisky', poured theatrically from a great height to froth it, offered everywhere as the language of welcome; refusing it politely and accepting it warmly is a tiny cultural lesson in itself. And the blue lanes of Chefchaouen, that whole indigo-washed mountain town, simply don't exist anywhere else in the form they take here.

If I had to name one more, it'd be Gnaoua music — the trance-like, bass-driven spiritual music with roots in sub-Saharan Africa, at its most powerful in Essaouira, especially around its famous June festival. My honest encouragement is to seek out the real versions of all these rather than the staged hotel-lobby imitations: a working tannery over a posed one, a genuine neighbourhood hammam, mint tea in someone's home, music in a real venue. The authentic versions are everywhere if you ask, and they're what make a Morocco trip feel like nowhere else you've been.