Talking Location with author Mark Bowsher – Morocco

12th September 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… with Mark Bowsher, the author of the fantasy novel The Boy Who Stole Time

I often read fantasy novels and feel that the worlds and landscapes are mostly inspired by other fantasy works’ worlds and landscapes, as opposed to real geographical locations. Which is fine. Fantasy is all about inventing places that don’t exist. Unless you’re like me and you have such a love of travel that you want to mix in real landscapes with the fictional ones. So although a lot of The Boy Who Stole Time comes from my imagination it started with a trip I made to Morocco in 2011.

It’s seven and a half hours from Marrakesh to the tourist hub of Zagora where many people depart on trips to the Sahara. But Zagora is 98km from the world’s biggest desert, which starts at the village of M’hamid. The road from Marrakesh runs through the middle of the village and peters off into the desert itself. It may take another hour or two to reach M’hamid but it’s worth it.

I had been in Aït Benhaddou, the famed mud-brick fortified village used as a film location for everything from The Man Who Would Be King to Game of Thrones, and had met a young guy called Rahmon. We were both watching a Syrian TV drama being filmed, we got chatting and he told me that his cousin ran a tour company in M’hamid, which I was where I was heading to next. He showed me the recommendation in the Lonely Planet guide and I decided to trust him, so we journeyed together to M’hamid.

To reach M’hamid we took about five taxis, all jam-packed with locals, and a bus with no air conditioning which briefly became a free school bus for local kids for a leg of our journey. I got a coach the whole way back to Marrakesh when I left which is what I’d recommend. Morocco’s national bus service is cheap, modern, air conditioned and comfortable.

On the way to M’hamid we passed many palmeries and I regret not jumping off the bus in one of the picturesque villages surrounding them and staying for a few days. The palmeries, simply collections of palm trees in rows or clusters, do make an appearance in The Boy Who Stole Time though. The hero Krish travels to the magical realm of Ilir to collect the Myrthali, the essence of time itself, to save his mother’s life. He is set three impossible challenges by a cruel king and teams up with a razor-tongued young girl-wizard, Balthrir, to complete the tasks. One of the challenges is to tie a bow around the globe of Ilir (a much smaller world than our own) and Krish and Balthrir often sleep in the palmeries, resting under the twinkling stars.

But the idea of walking vast distances came from my trip into the Sahara itself with Iguidi Tours. Rahmon and I arrived in M’hamid, a dusty little village with one main street, and immediately made our way across the rocky outskirts of the Sahara. This is where Iguidi have their ‘camp’ (a small single-storey building, invitingly open to the elements on one side). The place is clean and simple. I stayed for a few days and enjoyed hanging around with Rahmon and his fellow guides Mohamed and Omar, drinking in the peace and quiet of the desert. The utter silence of that first windless night at Iguidi’s camp has stayed with me for a long time. I had to remove a mention of it in my book as I’d described it twice already. You’ve never really heard silence until you’ve been somewhere like the Sahara.

We then journeyed out into the desert itself for five days, walking in the mornings and in the late afternoons, resting in the shade of an oasis from noon to 4pm each day while the sun was highest in the sky. Perhaps it was this slow rhythm of life which inspired me to make Ilir’s days short; they’re just ‘a handful of lunch-breaks’ long. And although we were accompanied by a caravan of camels they were there to do the heavy-lifting, not carry tourists. We walked the whole way, stopping every now and then for Mohamed to make green tea in a silver pot. He’d pour the tea back into the pot and  into the glass a number of times, pouring from a great height, to fill the tea with bubbles.

It took several days to reach the really big dunes and on the way you realise that the Sahara contains more landscapes than just endless sand. Dry earthen plains dotted with oases, flats scattered with shingle and hills of loose rock than are only remarkable in height when encircled by such endless flatness.

In the evenings the guides set up tents and created a campfire to cook us dinner. There would often be some guitar playing and singing in the evening under the stars. Many of those nights around the fire inspired Krish and Balthrir’s chats on their journey around Ilir.

So much of my trip to M’hamid and the neighbouring Sahara made its way into The Boy Who Stole Time and I hope that people won’t put down the book, dismissing Ilir as a fictional landscape and start looking up how to get to Morocco or indeed anywhere else in the Saharan region instead. As long as it gets people out and exploring the wonders of north Africa I don’t really care.

Thank you so much to Mark for sharing some top insights into travelling through Morocco. You can follow Mark on Twitter

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