What should I know about Moroccan toilets and hygiene before I go?

Let's be candid, because this is the question people are too shy to ask and most relieved to have answered. In riads, hotels and modern cafés you'll find ordinary sit-down Western toilets, often very clean. But step into a roadside café, a rural village, a bus station or an older medina spot and you'll frequently meet a squat toilet: a porcelain pan in the floor with footrests, a tap or a bucket of water and a hose (the "Moroccan shower") instead of toilet paper. It's perfectly hygienic once you know the drill, but it surprises the unprepared, so the golden rule is to always carry your own supplies.

Specifically, never travel without a packet of tissues and a bottle of hand sanitiser in your day bag — they are the two most useful items you'll bring, full stop. Public toilets, including some in petrol stations and markets, charge a small fee (a couple of dirhams) and sometimes hand you a few squares of paper in exchange, but assume there'll be none and bring your own. A travel pack of wet wipes is luxury. If you have any mobility issues with squatting, plan your bathroom stops around hotels, good cafés and museums, which reliably have seated facilities.

On water and stomachs: tap water is chlorinated and locals drink it in the cities, but visitors' systems aren't adjusted, so I steer clients to bottled or properly filtered water, including for brushing teeth in rural areas, for the first part of any trip. Skip ice you're unsure about and rinse fruit you peel yourself. None of this is because Morocco is dirty — it's simply that any unfamiliar water and food can unsettle a traveller's gut, the same way visitors to my own family abroad get caught out. A reusable bottle plus a filter, or just bottled water, removes the worry.

Street food is one of Morocco's great joys and you should absolutely eat it — just sensibly. Choose busy stalls with high turnover (locals queueing is the best hygiene certificate there is), food cooked hot in front of you, and bread-based or grilled items over things sitting lukewarm. Build up gradually rather than diving into everything on night one. Pack a basic kit — rehydration salts, an anti-diarrhoeal, hand sanitiser — and you'll almost certainly never need it. A little preparation turns the part of the trip people quietly dread into a non-issue.