How to spend 48 hours in Tangier

One of the few highlights of newly-released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a frantic chase through 1960s Tangier. It’s breathless, edge-of-the-seat stuff with tuk-tuks, motorcycles, a Jaguar and Mercedes tearing through the narrow streets of the medina, guns blazing and quips flying. I’m told so many tuk-tuks got mangled they needed dozens to shoot the scene. 

What a crushing disappointment, then, to discover that the sequence was filmed not in Tangier at all but in Fez and Oujda. The 1987 Bond film, The Living Daylights, was filmed in Tangier, as was its 2015 successor, Spectre. And there’s that nail-biting chase in the Bourne Ultimatum, of course, shot in cinéma vérité style. 

I learned all the above and more during a far-too-brief weekend in Tangier with Mrs Ray. I’d never been before. In fact, I’d never been to Morocco, although Mrs R dimly recollected a drunken girls’ trip to Marrakesh (dimly, I suspect, thanks to a touch too much kif in the Rif).