Bill Heine fends off repeated attempts to sell him hashish during a trip to North Africa

Marrakesh is a city with a mystery, but does the plot involve low life drug dealing, haute cuisine or just plain bog standard cobras?

All of the above.

Let’s start with the cobras. The centre of Marrakesh is the Medina, the old walled city. A huge square at the heart of the Medina is a magnet for millions and known as Jemaa El Fna, roughly translated as Assembly of the Dead, because, in the past, this area held spikes that displayed the heads of criminals.

Very little has changed over the centuries. No faces on sticks now, but almost everything else is the same today as it was 500 years ago.

UNESCO hails it as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”. All life is here. Dentists sit cross-legged in front of a pair of pliers on a mat. Barbers sit with a pair of scissors. Acrobats and fire eaters are leaping around.

Fortune tellers are crawling over the square like snakes. Cobras are waving in the wind, rocking back and forth like they were drugged up to the eyeballs or charmed out of their minds by the man playing, over and over, piercingly tinny music that would have Thames Valley Police knocking on your door if you lived in Headington.

The cobras were entranced enough but what would happen if the musician had a coughing fit or got thirsty or needed to take a loo break? When the snake charmer runs out of charms, where do the snakes go? And where are the health and safety inspectors when you need them? Thousands of people and five cobras don’t add up. It doesn’t make sense no matter how charming, but somehow in Marrakesh it works.

At least I thought it did until a few seconds later, when I had run 50 yards away. I came eyeball to eyeball with another, unknown, serpent.

My tongue was five inches away from its tongue. Fortunately it wasn’t the spitting kind. A Moroccan asked if I would like to have my picture taken for a fee with this snake, held by him at the jaws and wriggling on my shoulders.

Although I flipped out and ran away again, my sympathies were slipping. I wasn’t so much incensed by the presence of the snakes as by the commercial brutality of those abusing and exploiting them. I came away from Marrakesh with the sneaking suspicion that I have some sympathy with snakes.

Beyond the central square are the souks, dozens of alleyways with shops or cupboards selling exotic, colourful, clothes, jewellery, leather, metal, carpets, brass and Berber textiles of rich designs that reflect this Moroccan tribe’s ancestors, the Tartars in Russia.

This is the ‘boutique’ Marrakesh I had heard about, the part that almost put me off the visit. I thought it would be sanitised, cleaned up and presented for Western tourists. Nothing like that. It was raw yet refined, gracious but still growling.

Everywhere people were welcoming and inviting me to buy all of the objects on offer, then trying to sell me something else, mostly hashish. When I tried to deflect them by observing how vivid the colours were in the shop, filled to the brim with pottery and exotic glazes, they were ready with a retort: “The colours will be much more intense with this” and waived a giant joint in front of me.

The souks are a direct link with the early settlers of Marrakesh who lived by their wits and traded with Africans and Spanish travellers. But this rabbit warren of dens holds some surprises like the Black Magic Market where the discerning buyer can purchase everything needed for rituals like leeches and dead scorpions. “We also have hashish”, smiled one almost toothless man.

The Dyers Souk is a kaleidoscope of intertwining alleyways that turns into Tinkerbell territory when freshly dyed skeins of wool are hung out to dry above the alleys. You can easily spot the dyers – men with yellow, red, blue and purple colours all over their arms up to their elbows. They invited me to feel the wool…and the hashish.

Perhaps you have to have a certain kind of look before the gatekeepers of the drug dens unzip the underbelly of Marrakesh.

At the airport on the way back to England I met a 20 year-old couple who were disappointed with their experience in the city.

“There were no clubs and nothing exciting ever happened. We’d recommend Marrakesh as a safe place for our grandparents.”

Oxford Mail:

We ended our trip on a high. The food was magical – all of it – because we found a chain of three restaurants owned by a local Moroccan with a partner in New York City.

They wanted to create haute cuisine that people who lived in Marrakesh would want to feed their guests if they were hosting a dinner party.

They succeeded in spades.

The Nomad Café in the middle of the souks offered a roof-top view of this world heritage site.

The streets lit up below were a visual feast. The music from the mosques was a taste of the passion of the place.

The full moon started to rise over a market place that was packing up when our host arrived with hooded capes for us to wear and keep the chilled night air at bay.

Then the tagines, the couscous and the exquisite lambs arrived, surrounded by dishes that were a complete surprise and delight. The wine was local, delicious and inexpensive.

We also dined at another of the three restaurants, Le Jardin, an old majestic house turned into a culinary castle with several fireplaces so no capes this time, but the same high standard of food.

On the last day we had lunch al fresco at the Kosibar overlooking the original Badii Palace which took 25 years to build but is now a ruin, where storks fly in to land on the high six feet wide mud walls and build their huge nests. Feral cats prowl around the perimeter waiting for a chance to pounce The experience was like having a feast in a box at Covent Garden Opera House and watching this dance of death on the edge where nobody falls off and they just manage to keep it all together.

The whole visit was unmissable, irreverent and unrivalled.