I got lost in Morocco’s maze of medinas – and loved every minute | Morocco holidays

Somewhere between the coppersmiths and the woodcarvers, I achieve my goal. Mustapha, my guide, has stepped aside to buy some sweet pastries from a stall. (“You’ve got to try the kaab el ghazal, the ‘gazelle’s horns’. They’re really special.”) But there are some Gnawa musicians, with long black tassels on their hats rotating in time to their drums, and then I cannot resist looking at large copper pots, and the handmade kettles that lead on to brass antiques. I turn. What’s up here? A doorway and the clacking of a hand loom. As-salamu alaykum! Maybe I should head back? A man with a laden donkey bellows, “Balak!” Gangway! I take another turn. Hang on, I don’t recognise any of this.

At that moment, all the colours, tastes, sounds and sights are sprinkled with a magical leavening of adrenaline and the whole lot rises up like some delicious cake in the oven. I glance at the phone in my hand and make sure that location services have failed. It tells me nothing except that I am in Fez, a city of more than a million. The labyrinth has worked. I am lost.

Morocco has many such mazes. There are good ones in Rabat, El Jadida and Essaouira; Marrakech is known to many, and Tangier is wonderful, too. But I’m exploring the north-east of the country, starting with the largest and arguably the best: Fez, considered to be the spiritual and cultural capital.

The labyrinth has obsessed humans for a very long time. King Minos of Crete supposedly incarcerated the minotaur inside the original labyrinth under his palace. As a symbol for life’s uncertain and indirect path, the labyrinth has appeared throughout the ages – check out the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral. But what, I wonder, as I head deeper into Fez, is it like to live inside a maze? What does that do to the brain? In a world of GPS and satellite-tracking, when every key and sock will soon be instantly located by embedded software, when digital dependency is total and mental-mapping consigned to history, will we dream of getting lost?

Outside one small shop, I watch an old man carve combs from camel bones. There’s a slap on my back. “There you are!” says Mustapha, laughing as always. “We have a saying: those who can speak are never lost.”

We ask the…