Agadir is the best starting point

The city of Agadir Rabat - Arabstoday Once upon a time, an ageing, ailing couple from Germany set sail for Morocco in search of renewed vitality. For six sublime months, they took refuge in the creeks and crevices of Paradise Valley. It was here that they camped in rough bamboo shelters, roofs improvised with palms and wide banana leaves, bathing in and drinking the pristine mountain waters, lunching on local fruits, dining on nuts and honey and absorbing as many African sunbeams as possible. Suffice to say, well-being was reinstated and ailments chased away within a matter of weeks. Truth or fable, my husband and I are still not sure, but on hearing the tale during a dinner party in Casablanca, where we live, the whole idea of chasing away city-bred nasties from our tired systems was no less than irresistible and so, Birkenstocks firmly fitted, we took off in search of Paradise Valley. It would have been the most romantic of trips had we been alone, but since our son had his third birthday to celebrate we thought it only right that he come along too. Either way, the region just north of Agadir can be as fitting for families as it is for friends or couples. Famed for its honey, there is also an abundance of date palms, bananas, argan and almonds. Agadir is the easiest city to start out from. Unless big hotels, new buildings and a tourist-slash-business-dominated atmosphere are really your thing, there\'s not much to stay for in a city whose ancient heart was destroyed by the 1966 earthquake. The beach is a lovely sweep of sand and the marina is pretty, but pretty new, and there are discos and restaurants. Full stop. The environs are a different story. The coastline is no less than a glut of glorious beaches, often devoid of humanity, the sands thrown to the mercy of seabirds, Atlantic breezes and those aforementioned African sunbeams. We headed north, out of town. At the banana village of Aourir, the road to Imouzzer leads away from the ocean and up the river, which allows Paradise Valley to be just that. Follow through the modest country hamlets-cum-villages of Alma and Tamzargout. It\'s here that the almost tropical-seeming scenery commences. Natural plantations of date palms and banana trees abound, almost falling over themselves into the road from the waysides, all thick, green and succulent. The river, a rather unassuming trickle as rivers go, showed itself to be a grand life-giver in a year that has seen Morocco plagued from top to tail by drought, with the country\'s waterways, and thus its crops, parched and sorrowful. The Valley of Paradise unfurls from the village of Aksri whose serpentine road winds from one idyllic spot to the next. At every turn we spied three or four locals atop a rock or bank, just staring out. Above their heads are the nodular trunks of the region\'s mascot, the argan. This rare, evergreen grows profusely and uniquely throughout southern Morocco, where it seems to delight in the generally arid terrain. In one of those splendid magic tricks of nature, the goat and the argan tree live in perfect symbiosis. The goat climbs into its boughs - yes, literally climbs, our three-year-old emitted enraptured squeals upon seeing them perched like giant squirrels in the branches - and munches away at argan nuts. Later on, as nature would have it, the digested nut appears in the dung, is recovered, ready for the press, through which the argan fruit produces oil with fantastic cosmetic and culinary attributes.