What's it like to wander the Fes medina?

You step through one of the great gates — the blue-and-green tiles of Bab Bou Jeloud framing a tunnel of shops behind it — and the modern world simply stops. The lanes close in until you can touch both walls, the sky narrows to a ribbon of light far overhead, and the noise rushes up to meet you: a coppersmith's hammer ringing, a vendor singing his prices, the wet slap of dough, and over it all the cry of 'Balak! Balak!' as a man steers a donkey stacked impossibly high straight at you, and you flatten yourself against a doorway just in time.

Your nose works overtime because the medina has no single smell, only a constant relay. You pass a cedarwood stall and it's clean and resinous; three steps on, a spice merchant's pyramids of cumin and saffron hit the back of your throat; then mint, crushed underfoot at a herb seller's; then, unmistakably, the great tanneries, an ammonia punch so fierce the boy at the leather shop hands you a sprig of mint to hold under your nose before you climb to the terrace. From up there you watch men standing waist-deep in vats of dye laid out like a stained palette below.

Getting lost is not a risk here; it's a certainty, and eventually a pleasure. The medina has no grid and no logic you'll ever crack — nine thousand alleys folding in on themselves, dead-ends, tunnels, sudden squares. Your phone's blue dot spins uselessly. So you stop fighting it. You follow the flow of people, duck into a fourteenth-century medersa with its dizzying carved stucco and silence, emerge somewhere you don't recognise, and let a kid lead you back to a gate for a coin. The wrong turns are where the medina actually lives.

It will wear you out, and you should let it. By late afternoon your senses are full to overflowing and your feet ache from the worn stone underfoot. You climb to a rooftop café, order a mint tea, and look out over a sea of flat roofs and green minarets while the call to prayer rolls across the whole bowl of the old city at once, answered minaret to minaret. Down in the lanes the chaos continues without you for a moment. Few places on earth still feel this genuinely medieval, this unbroken — and you were just inside it.