Luxury Sahara Desert Escape

You leave after breakfast and climb into the High Atlas on the Tizi n Tichka, a pass that tops out above 2,200 metres with the road stitched along the mountainside and the villages getting smaller with every switchback. We stop where the view is worth it rather than where the coach parks are, and in winter there is often snow on the peaks either side.

Over the pass we turn off the main road into the Ounila valley for the old route down through Telouet, where the ruined Glaoui kasbah still has ceilings of carved cedar and zellige in rooms with no roof. The valley floor is a ribbon of almond and fig trees between red cliffs, and it delivers you to Ait Ben Haddou from behind, which is by far the better first view of it.

You cross the river to the ksar itself with a local guide and climb through it to the granary at the top for the view over the Ounila. Then a short half hour on to Ouarzazate and the Berbere Palace, a large low hotel with gardens and a proper pool, which after a day in the car is exactly what is needed.

The longest day, and the one that earns the Luxury Sahara Desert. You leave early and run east along the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs, through Skoura with its palm groves and the rose town of El Kelaa des Mgouna, then up into the Todra gorge where the walls close to twenty metres apart and rise three hundred metres straight up. We walk a stretch of the gorge floor where the river runs cold out of the rock.

After lunch the landscape empties out. Tinghir gives way to Tinejdad, then Erfoud, where the rock is full of four hundred million year old marine fossils and the workshops cut and polish them into table tops. Beyond Erfoud the tarmac runs straight through flat black desert and then, without much warning, the dunes of Erg Chebbi appear on the left like a range of mountains made of sand.

You change to camels at the edge of the erg in the late afternoon and ride in over the crests to camp as the sun goes down. Your tent is a proper suite with a real bed, an ensuite bathroom and hot water. Dinner is served under the stars, and after it someone will light a fire and drum, and you will stay up later than you meant to.

Nobody packs today. After breakfast on the sand you set out in a four wheel drive around the erg with a local driver who grew up here, out to the dry lake bed where flamingos stop in spring, past the abandoned kohl mines, and along the Algerian frontier where the dunes run on into a country you cannot enter.

Mid morning you stop at a nomad family camp. They keep goats, they move twice a year, and the tent is made of woven black goat hair that stays cool at forty degrees. You sit on the rugs, tea is made in front of you, and the conversation happens through your driver. There is no craft table at the exit and nothing is for sale. We pay the family a fixed fee for the visit.

In the afternoon you drive to Khamlia, a village settled by descendants of people brought north along the caravan routes from Mali and Sudan. The gnawa musicians there play with iron qraqeb castanets and a three string guembri over a deep, slow pulse that is closer to West Africa than to anything else in Morocco. You sit with them in a low room, they play a full set, and there is tea and peanuts afterwards. Back at camp, dinner and a sky with no light pollution for three hundred kilometres.

You watch the sunrise from a dune above camp, have breakfast, and then leave the erg westward on a road nobody took on the way in. First Rissani, the market town built on the ruins of Sijilmasa, where caravans from Timbuktu once unloaded gold and salt, and where the Alaouite dynasty that still rules Morocco began. The souk here is agricultural and unpolished, and on market days it is one of the most photogenic in the country.

From Rissani the road runs west across the hamada, a flat black stone desert broken by the occasional line of khettara wells, to Alnif, a small town under a jagged ridge that trilobite hunters have made half famous. The emptiness of this stretch is the point. There are two hours where you pass almost nothing at all, and that is a rarer experience than any monument.

The land softens as you reach the Draa, where a single river feeds a corridor of date palms hundreds of kilometres long with kasbahs set along it. By late afternoon you are climbing into the Dades valley, past the rock formations locals call the monkey fingers, to the Eden Boutique Hotel, a small house on the valley side with a terrace that catches the last light on the red cliffs.

Before turning west we drive the first few kilometres up into the Dades gorge itself, where the road does a famous set of hairpins up a cliff face and the canyon narrows to a slot. An hour here in the morning light, with almond trees on the valley floor and villages built into the rock, is worth the early start.

The drive back crosses Skoura, where we stop in the palm grove and walk ten minutes to a working kasbah, then Ouarzazate and up over the Tichka pass again. Coming from this direction the Atlas is a completely different mountain, green on the northern slopes and much steeper, and Marrakech appears below you in the plain in the late afternoon.

You are back at El Fenn by early evening with your luggage waiting and a room already made up. The evening is yours. Most people want a hammam and a quiet dinner on the roof rather than another walk, and we will have that arranged if you tell us in advance.

A last morning shaped around your flight. If you leave late we take three hours in the medina with a private guide, which is enough for the Ben Youssef madrasa, the Saadian tombs and a workshop or two, or enough for a proper run at the souk if you have a list. If you leave early, breakfast on the roof and a quiet car to the airport.

Anything you bought along the way that will not fit in a case, a rug from Tinghir or fossils from Erfoud, we will have arranged shipping for before you leave. Your driver takes you to Menara and walks you as far as the terminal doors.