Tips for visiting a bazaar in Morocco: There's more to it than shopping

Plunge into a Moroccan bazaar and leave any worries about getting lost behind. Old-town bazaars are maze-like, claustrophobic, crazy, wonderful, seductive and worn. You'll get lost for sure, but therein lies the pleasure of their random discoveries and experiences.

Down one blind alley you'll find metal craftsmen hammering on brass below Ali Baba lamps twinkling with light. Down another you'll find tannery workers stomping on hides in great pots of stinking pink and yellow dye.

Around a corner is the spice market with its cones of turmeric, paprika and chilli in little volcanoes of colour. And happy days if you come across a bakery with a clay oven: nothing better than gorging on flatbread still puffy with steam.

Everything is soaked in colour. Handmade rugs in rose-petal pinks, glittering jewellery to ornament a bride, made-in-China dresses, oranges and melons, plastic buckets, embroidered bags, enamelled plates and tajines. The smells are a marvel too: spices, orange blossom and sandalwood mixed with drains and dust.

Moroccan bazaars aren't just a place for shopping, tempted as you might be by the felt slippers, leather goods, wool carpets and jars of honey. Find a teahouse and let an hour drift away over mint tea. Snack on sizzling lamb. Squeeze into a coffeehouse and watch old men play backgammon and crunch walnuts under tattered posters of the Egyptian starlets of yesteryear.

Bazaars are a stickybeaker's delight, and a great way to get a feeling for ordinary life away from monuments and plush hotel districts. They're places for locals to meet, do business, have a simple meal, or gossip over a hubble-bubble. Kids play hopscotch beneath the severed heads of goats, or in between the eggplant stalls. Fortune-tellers and water-sellers wander.

In the more touristy areas you'll encounter street performers and juggling monkeys. Shoeshine boys will stare disdainfully at your shoes. Someone will try to sell you an antique carpet or meerschaum pipe or old map from French colonial days. Spend some money and take a memory home with you.

Old and new collides in Moroccan bazaars: laden donkeys and motorbikes, teenagers in jeans and old ladies swathed in black, lemons and lingerie sold side by side. The architecture has a dilapidated loveliness: doors peeling red or green paint and surrounded by mosaic work, old courtyards with splashing fountains, the occasional elaborate mosque or madrasa splattered with centuries of geometric Islamic design. Get lost, and you'll find your time well spent.