4 Days Tour from Casablanca: Sahara Camp, Todra Gorge and Ait Benhaddou

Your driver meets you at Mohammed V International Airport in Casablanca, or at your hotel, and we head inland right away. The coast fades behind you as the road crosses farmland and starts to climb into the Middle Atlas. We stop in Ifrane, a mountain town with alpine-style houses, and walk into the cedar forest near Azrou, where Barbary macaques wait by the road. In the evening, we reach Midelt, a quiet town at the foot of the mountains, where you have dinner and an early night before the desert. Overnight in Midelt, breakfast and dinner included.

After breakfast the road drops from the mountains into the Ziz Valley, a long green strip of palm trees, old villages and red cliffs. We stop at viewpoints on the way and continue to Erfoud, a town known for the fossils cut from the desert rock. Near Rissani we pass the old khettara channels, underground tunnels that carried water through the desert for centuries. In the late afternoon the dunes of Erg Chebbi appear at Merzouga. You ride a camel across the sand at sunset, or go by 4x4, to your camp, where you sleep in a luxury tent. Dinner and music by the fire finish the day. Overnight in a luxury tent at the Sahara camp, breakfast and dinner included.

If you wake early, you can watch the sun rise over the dunes before breakfast at the camp. Then we leave the sand for Rissani, an old caravan town and a market for dates, and drive west to the oasis of Tinghir. With a local guide you walk along its palm-lined river between mud-brick villages. Next is the Todra Gorge, where tall limestone walls rise on both sides of a flat riverbed you can walk along. In the afternoon we follow the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs into the Dades Valley, whose red cliffs glow in the evening light. Overnight in the Dades Valley, breakfast and dinner included.

We leave the Dades Valley after breakfast and drive through the Rose Valley, which is at its most fragrant in April and May, and through the palm grove of Skoura, where we can stop at Kasbah Amridil. In Ouarzazate we pass the town's film studios and continue to Ait Benhaddou, the earthen village that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A guide walks you across the river and up through the alleys to the old granary for a view over the village. After lunch we cross the High Atlas by the Tizi n'Tichka pass, at about 2,260 metres, and reach Marrakech in the late afternoon. We drop you at your hotel or riad, and your four days end where the mountains meet the city. Breakfast included.