Episode One

Alice Morrison, Arabist, writer, explorer and Marrakech resident, follows what was once one of the world's richest trading networks - the infamous salt roads - across North Africa from the top of Morocco to the fabled sandstone city of Timbuktu. Trekking 2,000 miles across some of the deadliest landscapes on earth, Alice journeys deep into the history, culture and civilisation of both ancient and modern North Africa.

Setting off from Tangier, Europe's gateway to Africa, Alice learns how gold was in high demand in North Africa. Its source was the gold mines of sub-Saharan Africa, and so the routes across the desert were forged. Hitching a ride in a crowded taxi of locals, Alice passes through Fes, home to the world's oldest university, where she stays in a caravanserai, the ancient traders' version of a motel with mule and camel parking, and helps prepare the merchant's dish of the day, camel meatballs. Next, she catches the famous hippy train, the Marrakech Express, to the other northern terminus of trans-Saharan trade, the great market town of Marrakech.