I had arrived in M’Hamid al Ghizlane on my motorbike; it’s a long ride from Somerset. It was a diversion from doing an MBA. The MBA was rubbish, Morocco was mind-blowing.

I was in M’Hamid, on the very edge of the Sahara with the intention of catching the Internationally Famous Nomad Festival with its mysterious Tuareg singers, its Berber dancers and its hypnotic desert-driven rhythms. But trying to find anybody who actually knew when, where and what was going on was hard. Lots of vague notions passed around, and a few people nodded and made calls, to other people who possibly knew a bit more, but there was no actual Definite Answer.

The ceremony, press registration, festival organiser, organisers centre, stage and the first acts were definitely starting in the Draa river bed, or at a hotel, or 60kms away in the desert, or just up the road a bit, or nearly ready. Definitely, yes.

When I decided to go to the festival, I saw where M’Hamid al Ghizlane was on the map — it was where the major roads stopped. I thought I’d spice things up and romanticise the trip by telling people it was where the desert really started, Indiana Jones territory and all that. But when I went to the end of the main street, that’s what it was like: no road. Total desert. Just sand and stones.

It’s incredible that people can live there. The old souk is so deep in sand the town has abandoned it. To make things even tougher the government has built a dam further up the river valley, to help irrigate the bigger and more developed towns of Ouzazarte and Zagora. So now M’Hamid is dying for lack of water.

For millennia, it was the last reliably flowing river before the Sahara began, but now the river bed is totally dry. It does mean the guy riding his donkey to the rubbish tip doesn’t get wet any more, but as Tahar told me as he poured us mint tea in the depths of the M’Hamid Kasbah, the people are really suffering. They can’t grow the crops they used to, and there is no work at all. Tahar’s grandfather was from Mali, so he looks more Black than Arab, but he has Arab courtesy and charm.

He lives in an enormous empty house made of mud with no furniture with just carpets on a bare earth floor. While we were drinking, a wild-eyed, unkempt woman in a bourkah came in, muttering and dribbling. She stared and poked about a bit, then wandered out again. It felt really sad. “She is a mad woman,” said Tahar, pouring more sweet tea.

To lift the mood, I was lucky enough to be staying with Omar the Pessimistic back in town — the cook, receptionist and door-keeper at Dar’m Hamid, the rooming house where I stayed. It was definitely cosy: three rooms, but with a great feel, traditional decorated mud walls all through and wonderful natural lighting.

Omar was probably the worst negotiator I’ve ever met. He told me it was 200 dirhams a night, especially as it was Festival week and lots of people would be queuing to stay. I gave him a shrug and he immediately dropped it to 150, which I thought was pretty good. I said OK, three nights, at which he said, “Oh yes, but it’s 150 just for the first night then it goes up to 200 plus breakfast.” I suggested that was a very poor deal and started to walk out, so he immediately said OK 150 it is, all in. He spent the next three days looking sour, even when I let him have a quick go on my bike, but it was a delightful stay even when he “forgot” to switch the shower heating on.

While I was there, I also met Said, the camel rider. He took me straight to where the festival was, introduced me to Marouani, a genuine wild man Tuareg, and said he’d dress me up as a Berber to go to that nights music. Then he took me back to his house (complete with sheep and camel pen in the back yard) where his sisters cooked a delicious couscous in a pan his father had inherited when he got married. He is now 96; they don’t make saucepans like that any more.

His sisters all wore normal western clothes around the house, track suits and all, and had their hair down, patted my arm to make a point and had no problem at all talking to me when we were alone. The bourkah in M’Hamid, it seems, is more a practical garment to keep the sand out than a form of female oppression.

The festival itself did actually happen, about nine o’clock, after lots of wailing and prancing about by “international” acts (who all admitted they lived in Paris when I asked them how long they had lived in Morocco/Tamil Naidu/the Comoros) a band that really did come from Niger, Atri N’Assouf, came on. What a blast.

The atmosphere was incredible — desert sands every direction, just the wind, the stars and this amazing hypnotic beat just going on and on and on. One woman, utterly hidden in a black bourkah but covered in beautiful silver filigree jewellery, climbed to the top of a dune and began singing to the stars and the moon. Right then it would have been fine if I was struck by lightning; such beauty is hard to describe, and saying it made me shiver doesn’t do it justice. But it did, even in the warm, cooling early evening of the desert.

Not long after, an old Berber man next to me (who I learned later was around 80 years old) grabbed my hands and started shuffling about in his slippers.

Before I could protest I was a western tourist and not familiar with dancing with men in long skirts, Marouani the Tuareg came up and grabbed us both by the shoulders and started a kind of desert Cossack dance that involved shouting and clapping and singing all at the same time. Totally brilliant.

It must have been brilliant because the next day a Berber woman came up to me on the street and told me that I danced just like a Berber and I could drop by and see her anytime when I was next in town. It’s the first time my dancing has ever impressed anybody that much.

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