Marrakech or Marrakesh? The internet can't seem to decide which one you should use.
After minimal sleep (which was to become a recurring theme on this trip), my alarm woke me at 4am for my taxi ride to Gatwick.
I was on a 7am Friday flight to Morocco, my first visit to north-of-the-Sahara Africa.
He's done several big peaks and said it was a challenging climb, but doable. And ticking off a new country - just 3hrs away but culturally so different - was the big draw for me.
I'd booked the trip, pre-Covid, for 2020. I postponed it to 2021, and then had to postpone again to 2022.
After an uneventful journey I landed in the 30 degree heat of Marrakech, had a lengthy wait to get through passport control, successfully haggled with a taxi driver on the price (200 Dirhams down to 150) and eventually made it to the Medina by midday.
I went straight to my Riad - the Secret de Zoraida - where I was staying on my final night on the Monday.
There I was welcomed by Abdul, the son of the owner (I assumed), who was a lovely guy. He served me tea - peppermint with lots of sugar - and happily said I could leave my luggage there all day.
"This is your home. You come and go as you please."
My first task was to get a SIM card to avoid the extortionate roaming charges of BT Mobile.
Abdul helpfully showed me on a map where to head to in the main Jemaa el-Fnaa square.
I worked my way through the narrow alleyways of the Medina to the square, got some dirhams out of an ATM and found 'SIM card corner'.
Within seconds I was approached by a guy with an Orange Mobile jacket on, a wedge of SIM cards in his hand.
We did the deal - £8 for unlimited roaming internet for 5 days - and I was Google Mapped up.
A good job too, as the Marrakech Medina - its walled city - is a rabbit warren of lanes that generally look alike.
I had five or six hours to kill before being picked up by my organised tour for the weekend in the Atlas mountains, so I followed Abdul's walking tour route around the Medina.
After wandering through the souks and narrow passageways for an hour I needed a break, so stopped for lunch in an air-conditioned cafe called Moorish.
I had lunch of falafel, quinoa salad and juice. Tasty, pretty cheap and pretty as a picture:
After lunch I made my way to the Madrasa Ben Youssef, a historic mosque in the Medina with some of the finest architecture in the city.
The level of craft that went in to that building was incredible. Every tiny detail, from ceilings to walls to windows to floors, was a work of art.
I spent an hour or so meandering between silent, tucked-away rooms and courtyards. Peace.
After that I visited the Marrakech Museum. Compared to the Madrasa it was a let-down. Very few exhibits and no signs in English (so couldn't understand the significance of the various pictures or artefacts).
By this time it was late afternoon so I headed slowly back through the souks, politely smiling my way through hundreds of sales propositions from shop owners.
It would've been remiss of me not to try some local delicacies though, like this sticky pistachio turnover followed by an intense hit of local coffee.
Even though Marrakech is famous for its souks, and I knew what to expect before I got there, I couldn't quite get my head around how many shops and stalls sold EXACTLY the same things as dozens of others nearby.
I mean, how many people in any given week need a silver teapot from Marrakech? I must've seen 25-30 shops that afternoon all selling the same silver teapots, and all looking short of customers.
It must be a tough job being a trader there.
After scooping up my bag from the riad I walked back through the square and took a table outside our meeting point of the Hotel Ali.
At 7.30pm the rest of my tour group for the next couple of days showed up, along with our chief guide, and we jumped in a minibus for a 1.5hr journey south to Imlil.
On the trip we had Andy and Mark (father and son L***pool fans from the Isle of Man), David (Scotland), Gill (Brighton), a couple of lads from Ireland and another couple from Poland.
At our small guesthouse in Imlil we were served dinner, had a quick getting-to-know-each-other chat and then tried to bed down for the night.
I was in a room with David and struggled to get much sleep - maybe managed 3-4 hours in total.
So the next day I wasn't feeling tip-top as we grouped outside the guesthouse for the first day's hike towards the mighty Mount Toubkal.