The Boyfriend and I had found Ahmed at the taxi rank the day before, and secured his services for a day’s trekking in the Lower Atlas mountains. He was at the door of our beautiful Marrakech ‘riad’ bright and early at 5.30am, with a donkey cart full of Evian and a broad smile. “Ahlan wa sahlan!”, and we were speeding away from the city in Ahmad’s Peugeot.

Immediately on leaving the Old City, the urban bustle fell away into a green agricultural landscape, richly irrigated and dotted with smart farmhouses and the occasional white ranch house with a Lexus on the driveway. As we drove across flat plains with the Atlas range rearing dramatically from the red earth ahead, we began to pass ruined caravanserais and more rustic farmsteads.

After climbing foothills for an hour, frantically translating Ahmed’s running French commentary to the strictly Anglophone Boyfriend, we arrived in a small Berber village nestled in a lush green nook of the dusty red hills, with crystal blue spring water babbling through irrigation channels. Ahmed located a guide for us – Yusuf - and settled into a cafe to drink coffee and watch football for the day.

Yusuf was typically Berber in appearance, with caramel skin, curly fair hair and blue eyes: a striking contrast to the Arab Moroccans in the city. In shorts and flip-flops, Yusuf took us on a high trail that tested our boots and our lungs, but rewarded us with views of the snowy peaks of the High Atlas, and the fertile valleys of the lower hills. Few people realise there’s a ski season in North Africa!

Along the way, we encountered several groups of berber children, girls as well as boys, shepherding their flocks between scrubby patches of green, and greeting us in heavily-accented French: “Boun-zooourrrr!”.

Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa west of the Nubian region, with a small majority now living in Morocco. Their most famous son has to be Zinedine Zidane, whose poster can be found on every Berber boy’s wall! Yusuf spoke openly to us on our hike about the political and cultural restrictions of being a Berber in Arab Morocco. Even his own name was a result of the government ban on Berber names for newborns.

We completed our hike at a friendly farmhouse, where Yusuf’s impossibly wrinkled grandmother baked us fresh flatbread and dished up sweet goat milk ‘labneh’ and bitter mint tea to steel us for the long ride home, and Ahmed’s garrulous nature.

It had been a day of stunning scenery, friendly people and unexpected lessons in the life of modern Morocco.