Les Jardins de la Koutoubia in the shadow of the great mosque

Like Webster’s dictionary – as the Road movie theme song has it – I’m Morocco bound. Marrakech, to be precise, but we touch down to change planes at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca. Casablanca – the name has acquired a mythic ring but, unlike Shangri-La or Oz, this place actually exists. Yes, I know that not a frame of the movie had anything to do with the real Morocco (it's all Burbank; there was a war on, you know) but, hell, this is the tarmac at Casablanca. It's been raining heavily and we are all taken aback to find ourselves, in the heart of this desert area, sploshing through a maze of deep puddles. I'm aching to make a joke about coming to Casablanca for the waters, but I’m afraid I might be the only movie buff on the flight.

This was supposed to be a holiday. A break from the compulsive visiting of film locations that has taken up most – OK, all – of my spare time since I had the bright idea of compiling a guidebook to, say, fifty of “Your Favourite Film Locations” back in 1992. I’m a completist. I don’t know when to stop. Four thousand films, and counting. I should have known better.

And, true to form, I’ve already succumbed. By one of life’s amazing coincidences, there’s someone I know in town. A location manager, who has helped me out in the past, is working on Oliver Stone’s Alexander, with Colin Farrell and Angelina Jolie. I might just look him up. Might, that is.

Most of the filming in Morocco (and there is a lot) centres on Ait Benhaddou, near Ouarzazate, where there is now a busy studio complex. This is a favourite of Martin Scorsese, who shot both Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ in the country. Filming at Ait Benhaddou goes back to 1962, when the odd team of Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) and spaghettimeister Sergio Leone, made The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah. Regarded as pretty damn racy in its day, this epic now looks a bit tame and turgid, but it established the star quality of Ait Benhaddou’s cluster of fortified towers. Lawrence of Arabia, Jewel of the Nile and Gladiator also filmed here. You can still see part of Jewel's set: a section of wall with a jetplane-shaped hole in it.

Now, here's the thing about Morocco. The currency is controlled. You can't take dirhams in or out of the country. This means you can't change currency before you leave. It also means that what you change while in the country, you have to spend before you leave. So draw money out in small amounts. The problem I have is that I'm taking a night flight and arrive in Casablanca at around 9pm, when the Bureau de Change is closed. I have a two-hour wait for my connecting flight and no money for a coffee or a bottle of water. Ouch. I'm also worried that there may be nothing at Marrakech, and how will I get to my hotel?

There had been a bomb attack on Casablanca earlier in the year, so airport security is tight. The queues at immigration are not long, but it takes forever to be processed. I should be glad of the security, but I do get into that frustrating frame of mind which sees every queue moving twice as fast as the one I'm standing in. And, of course, when I change queues, the one I move to immediately slows to a crawl.

Good news, Marrakech’s Menara Airport has a cash machine, so I finally get my hands on some dirhams. I've been so worried about being caught without money that I forget my own advice and draw out far more than I need. This is my first trip to Morocco and it's nearly midnight, so I'm relieved to see a driver holding a card bearing my name at Arrivals. It's a short ride to my hotel, Les Jardins de la Koutoubia. I give the driver a huge tip, because I have no change. I'm so crap at tipping. The unmissable landmark of Marrakech is the minaret of the historic Koutoubia mosque in the center of town. Les Jardins is on a short side street in its shadow. This has become my rule of thumb for strange cities when I'm travelling alone – get a hotel near a major landmark: you can always find your way home after a drink.

The minaret is a constant reminder that, despite its free and easy reputation, Marrakech is in an Islamic country and the bars of large hotels are the only places you can buy alcohol. It's around 12.15am and the Koutoubia’s bar, which I was desperately looking forward to, closed at midnight. Never mind. The Koutoubia is luxurious beyond what I'm used to. And very, very quiet. For the time being. It's a small hotel, two-stories on four sides around a central pool, and quite new, though traditional design elements rescue it from modern. Sensors turn on elaborate lamps as I walk along the otherwise pitch-dark corridor, which is both creepy and exotic.

The minaret of the Koutoubia mosque

The view from my second floor window is impressive, across the pool over the roof to the illuminated tower of the Mosque. Time to relax and raid the minibar.

It's five in the morning when I discover a drawback to the hotel's location. A sepulchral, stentorian voice comes booming through my window. It could be the voice of God announcing the end of the world. Of course, it's the call to prayer from the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque. I've heard this before in Tunisia, but never so amplified, so close and so damn terrifying. It's like it's directed straight into my room. And, yes, it's every morning. Makes church bells sound so wussy.

My visit to Marrakech is brief, so the Koutoubia turns out to have been a good choice. Although there are small, backpacker hotels in town, the large complexes are lined up along a dull, dusty main road outside the centre. I'd like to spend more time feeling my way about the city. It’s scruffy, uniformly sand-pink, and seems oddly unfocused, with no single centre and, despite a city wall, liable to peter out suddenly. But maybe that's my unfamiliarity with the place. For a city that has been on the hippie trail since forever, there seems to be little English spoken, so I get by on my rusty schooldays French. I’m delighted to find the ubiquitous Internet café, albeit in the basement of a rather gloomy little shopping mall. It’s incredibly cheap for an hour, but the time flies by as I find my way around the unfamiliar layout of the Arabic keyboard, and I’m reduced to the status of a single-finger typist as I check my email. A reply from my location manager. That’s what I wanted to hear.

In the past, the city was notorious for the persistent hassling of tourists, but there are now scarily strict tourist police ready to clamp down on street vendors at a moment's notice. I realise I've changed more money than I'm going to need, so I'm pleased not to have to keep counting the cost. Sitting at a terrace restaurant with a fresh orange juice, a young man with a roughly-made wooden box offers to clean my shoes.

I'm happy to offload two more dirham, but he doesn't seem to understand that I don't want to haggle. I've never had my shoes cleaned by anyone before and I'm uncomfortable with his, necessarily, grovelling posture. But there are some posh hotel bars to explore and I don't have shoe polish with me, so it suits us both. But not the tourist police. Two guys on a scooter appear from nowhere and grab my shiner. I try to explain I was happy for the service, that I asked him to clean my shoes, that I was willing to pay for the service, but they have a job to do and there's no arguing. Marrakech imposes zero-tolerance. The man's box is confiscated and he's carted away. I look down. He'd finished polishing my boots but didn’t get paid. I feel really guilty.

With proudly shining boots, I meet up with my friend in the lobby of the Meridien hotel, which appears to have been commandeered by the film company. There may be disruption and occasional stories of – perish the thought – excess, but most countries welcome the arrival of a major production as a boost for the economy, both during filming and, hopefully, from increased tourism on the film’s release. Morocco is particularly skillful at presenting itself as film-friendly. The sets for Alexander have been built in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, about an hour's drive outside Marrakech. The road snakes through increasingly smaller villages, where boys stand by the roadside holding out what appear to be baskets of red berries for sale. As we climb higher, sudden bends reveal unexpected gorges, and I’m glad to be with a driver who’s been negotiating this route a couple of times a day for several months. The day is dull and overcast and a grey mist shrouds the tops of the mountains.

From behind, as we arrive, the sets are vast, messy structures of scaffolding and wood, but viewed from the front become utterly convincing. They are not what I expected. I'm no expert on the period or the geography of the film, but the whole look is unfamiliar. It's not like anything I've seen on screen before. The dull red colour matches the native sandstone, blending the ominous, spiked towers into the landscape. The style echoes the Berber villages over which the towers loom, in effect, transforming the whole valley into a movie set. Charnel houses packed with disturbingly realistic human skulls (which turn out to be molded from unexpectedly squishy rubber), the ground littered with fruit and still-fresh pitta bread from the previous day’s filming of Alexander’s wedding feast. The scale is epic and it leaves me aching to see the finished movie.

I was brought up on historical epics, my favourite genre when I was a kid. More togas! More swords! More blood! And if you get a great conflagration at the end, well, that's even better. I was too young to see Sodom and Gomorrah on its first release, touted as a debauched sex movie, and had to content myself with the lurid, tie-in paperback. I collected all the publicity material I could find, and in art class, when everyone else was painting pictures of the beach and the 'what I did on my holidays' stuff, I was producing apocalyptic images of Biblical cities in flames. I had no idea at the time that the strange walls and towers I copied were Ait Benhaddou. Now, here, standing on the set in Morocco, it feels like I've come full circle. I should be cool about this but, in truth, I'm more excited than I have any right to be. God, I love the movies. The critical drubbing given to Alexander on its release comes as a personal affront.

The most famous film shot in Marrakech, though, must be Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Part of the movie was shot in London, and particularly in Camden Town, where I worked for nearly twenty years, so it seemed fitting to be checking out the other end of the film shoot. Hitchcock, with his customary attention to accurate geography, used a real hotel as the base for his American tourists, James Stewart and Doris Day: the impossibly lavish La Mamounia, on avenue Bab Jdid. The Mamounia is still the most grand, and expensive, hotel in Marrakech and, in fact, one of the world's great luxury hotels (it was reportedly home to Ms Jolie for the duration of Alexander’s location shoot). It has had a major renovation since the fifties and the frontage looks little like the hotel as it appears in the Hitchcock film. I suspect that, in t-shirt and jeans, I wouldn’t normally make it past the intimidating guard stationed at the entrance, but the ubiquitous presence of the ostentatiously informal movie crowd gives me the opportunity to adopt a confident ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ swagger. The interior of the hotel is a riot of gleaming art deco, but the bar is surprisingly muted. It's dark and glistening, black and silver, disconcertingly like a seventies West End disco. I think I insult the barman, who is ready and waiting with all kinds of exotic ingredients to whip up a rare and mysterious cocktail, by ordering a beer. To be honest, this isn't my kind of environment (maybe because I'm travelling alone), but I had to experience it.

My last day in the city, and one place I've not yet visited is Marrakech's great square, the Jemaâ el Fna, which I've been saving up. It’s worth the wait. A narrow alleyway of shops, the domain of stationary horse-drawn carts and speeding motor scooters, leads to the wide-open square. In the morning, it's scruffily empty. Shopkeepers are sweeping up or sluicing down the road, but returning in the afternoon, it's sprung to life. Around the edge of the square, near the road from the Koutoubia, shops are selling the same plastic goods you can buy worldwide. Alarm clocks, which seem to be constantly alarmed, and endless racks of CDs.

This is the square at which Stewart and Day arrive in The Man Who Knew Too Much, and where they witness the killing that sets the plot in motion. Hitchcock chooses his settings carefully: the couple enter Jemaâ el Fna, and leave it changed in some way. And that is the feel you get from the place, where cultures meet and adapt – where CDs vie with traditional storytellers. I've done something I rarely do, which is to leave my camera back at the hotel. I admit it's partly a security measure – I'm attached to my old Olympus, and I don't know quite what to expect from this crowded melee – but I also want the freedom to experience the city without the constant need to record. This is a great place to get lost, which is easy once you wander out into the rows of stalls now filling the square. Occasionally there's a disorienting white-out from billows of thick smoke, exploding from spicy barbecues. Your sense of direction falters, which is exactly what you want here, wandering from stall to stall, the familiar mundane tourist tat alongside the inexplicably strange. Somebody tries to dump a chattering monkey on my shoulder. I know I'll be stung for a handful of dirham, so I try to brush it off. It's not that I grudge giving the guy money, but I fear that if I'm spotted as the kind of dorky tourist who goes 'Ah, look at the little monkey' and hands over a wad of notes, I'll disappear in a scrum of monkeys, snakes, parakeets and God knows what. That's paranoia, I suppose. Marrakech, as I found out, is now far too well policed for that. The guy is persistent, "For the monkey, for the monkey." he cries, and the monkey has been trained to cling. I give in, check who's watching, hand over a few notes and make a break for it.

But just as I assume that this is little more than a theme park, contrived to fleece gullible tourists like me, I notice that the food stalls seem to be patronised entirely by locals, and the rapt audience gathered around energetic storytellers is not European. And, yes, I find that staple of all B-movie bazaars, snake-charmers. The snake does indeed rear up and does seem to behave obediently. But it’s not kept in the wicker basket beloved of Hollywood. No. This snake, apparently a cobra, writhes on the bare ground within striking distance of my ankle, until the charmer chooses to pop a box over it until the next show. Is it doped? Had its fangs pulled? Is it animatronic? Or is it me that’s charmed, by the Jemaâ el Fna?

A final glass of strong, sweet mint tea and I'm off to collect my luggage and head for the airport. I've been here far too short a time. There's still much to see, and I find myself wondering if it’s insulting that I was here only to check out movie locations. Because, let’s be honest, if it weren't for the films, I would never have travelled here in the first place. Did I try to kid myself this was a holiday? Whenever life deals you a coincidence, it’s because you stacked the deck in advance. If it weren’t for movies, I’d never have found myself taking the hydrofoil to the breathtaking island of Ischia, looking for Tom Ripley’s fictitious ‘Mongibello’, never have followed Barry Lyndon to the San Souci palace complex at Potsdam, or Anakin Skywalker to the extraordinary Villa Balbianello, perched on a promontory overlooking Lake Como.

I promise to return. In the meantime, I go home, to re-watch The Man Who Knew Too Much and await the release of Alexander.

I still need to unload the last few dirhams, though, so this seems a good time to get souvenirs: a terra cotta model of the kasbah, and an impressively sized fossil, which turns out to have been ‘enhanced’ with a little hand-carving. Oh well. What did I expect? I'm the kind of dorky tourist who says 'Ah, look at the little monkey.

Tony Reeves combines his twin passions for film and travel as author of movie travelling companions - The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations (2001, revised later this year) and The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations presents: London. Review his work and buy his books at the www.movie-locations.com.