Blue, Then Brown

• Chefchaouen, from the Ain Tissemlal road
• 16:40
• 17°C, clear, hazy

The bus from Tangier drops you at the bottom of the hill and the whole town is stacked above you, which means your first look at it is the one everybody photographs and you cannot help photographing it too. I told myself I would wait for better light. Then I put the bag down on the wall and shot it anyway, because a 35mm is exactly the wrong lens for this and I wanted the failure on the card.

• The Spanish Mosque ridge
• 06:55
• 9°C, haze, no wind

So I went at six. Twenty minutes up the path towards the ruined mosque on the far side of the valley, in the dark, past two other people with tripods who had clearly been told the same thing by the same man. The haze came off the Rif and sat in the streets, and for about eight minutes the whole town was one temperature of light.

• Tizi n'Tichka
• 11:25
• 14°C, bright, thin cloud

Chefchaouen to Marrakech, then a shared car up over the Tizi n'Tichka the next morning. The road stops being green somewhere after Aït Ourir and then it is all switchbacks and pink rock and lorries that overtake into the bend. I shot this through the windscreen from the middle seat, which is why the bottom third of it is dashboard.

car sick for the last hour and refusing to admit it

• Above Aroumd, Imlil valley
• 10:50
• 6°C, clear

Above Aroumd the path climbs the left bank and you can see the whole system at once — the walnut terraces, the flat-roofed houses the exact colour of the hillside, and the wall of the Toubkal massif closing the end of it. I kept trying to make a picture that had a person in it for scale, and everyone I met was moving too fast.