From the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara Dunes

Seven nights and around 621 miles on a Royal Enfield, from Ait Benhaddou deep into the Sahara and back over a 2,300 metre pass. It is the operator’s desert route and the one with a night under canvas in the dunes.

Ait Benhaddou opens it, an eleventh-century ksar of earthen towers on the old caravan road towards Timbuktu. Foum Zguid follows by way of Ouarzazate and the Fint oasis, and includes a stretch of the original Paris-Dakar racetrack, which ran through southern Morocco before the rally moved to South America and then to Saudi Arabia.

Zagora comes next across the Draa, then M’Hammid, where the tarmac effectively ends and the Erg Lihoudi dunes begin. The night there is spent in a desert camp with no light pollution for a very long way in any direction. The route then turns north through N’Kob, a town with more than forty kasbahs and a working pottery, passing the Koranic library at Tamegroute, which holds manuscripts going back to the eleventh century.

The last riding days cross the Jbel Saghro massif and the Tizi n’Tazazert pass at around 2,300 metres, a rough and remote road that is the high point of the trip in both senses, before the Dades Gorge and the tracks at Skoura lead back to Ait Benhaddou. Bike rental is included and the price is quoted per person. Seven nights is enough to feel the landscape change from mountain to stone desert to sand, which is the point of going this far south, and the Saghro crossing is harder going than anything on the operator’s shorter Atlas loops.