Chasing the Sahara

Seven nights in the deep south of Morocco on an enduro bike, guided, looping out from Ouarzazate to a desert camp.

Ouarzazate gets called the door to the desert and has a film industry built around that fact. The Anti-Atlas comes first, with remote Berber villages along the way, then Ait Benhaddou, a fortified village of rammed earth that has stood in for half the ancient world on screen, from biblical epics to recent television.

The Dades Gorge follows, with off-road riding in the side valleys, then the dry bed of Lake Iriki, which holds water only in exceptional years and otherwise offers a hard flat surface and nothing else for a long way. The Saharan dunes are the far point, with a night under canvas at a camp set up for it, a campfire with local musicians and a pre-dawn climb up a dune to watch the sun come up.

Bike hire is included, on a Gas Gas EC 450F, with a discount for anyone bringing their own. This is an enduro tour rather than an adventure one: the bikes are light, the riding is technical and sand is involved, so some off-road experience is assumed. Eight days is enough for the Anti-Atlas, the gorges and the dunes without a long transit between them, since Ouarzazate sits in the middle of all three. Spring and autumn are the seasons, since summer out there is extreme. The night at the dune camp is the part everybody remembers, and the pre-dawn climb is worth the lost sleep.