4 Days Desert Tour from Agadir to Marrakech: 2 Nights in Erg Chigaga

The day starts with the Agadir traffic fading behind you. By mid-morning the road has turned into the foothills, and you stop in Taroudant to walk a stretch of its red walls before the heat builds. Past Taznakht, where rug shops line the road, the hills get barer and the villages smaller. In Foum Zguid you sit down to lunch, and then the tarmac stops for good. The 4x4 drops onto the open plain and crosses the pale, cracked floor of Lake Iriki, and for the next hours the horizon is the only landmark. The first dunes appear as a thin orange line and slowly grow into ridges. Your tent is waiting at the foot of them, with mint tea poured as the light turns gold, and after dinner the fire and the stars take over.

There is no alarm today, and no road. Most guests climb the nearest dune before breakfast, because the sunrise on the sand is worth the short walk. Then the day is yours: a long camel ride along the ridges, tea in the shade of the tent, and a lunch at camp when the sun is high. When it cools down, you can carry a board up the big dunes and slide down them, or just sit and watch the shadows move. At sunset everyone ends up on the same ridge. Dinner is round the fire, the drums come out, and you sleep a second night with the whole sky overhead.

After breakfast the 4x4 leaves the dunes behind, and by late morning you reach M'Hamid, the village where the paved road begins. In Tamegroute you can watch potters turn out the green glazed bowls that the village is known for, and look inside its old Koranic library. From here the road follows the Draa Valley north, one long ribbon of date palms between the desert and the mountains, with ruined kasbahs on every ridge. We stop whenever the view asks for it. Dinner and the night are in a hotel in Agdez, where you finally get a proper bed, a hot shower and a quiet evening.

The last day takes you from the desert to the mountains. In Ouarzazate you pass the film studios, and then comes the day's best stop: Aït Benhaddou, an old mud-brick village on a hill that you can walk through with a local guide. After lunch the road begins to climb. The Tizi n'Tichka pass is the highest road in the High Atlas, and the descent on the other side opens onto the plain of Marrakech. Your driver drops you at your hotel in the evening, in the city where the trip ends.