Marrakech to Fes, with a night in the dunes
This is the cheapest honest way to put the Sahara between Marrakech and Fes. You travel in a small group — usually eight to seventeen people — in an air-conditioned minibus with an English, French and Spanish speaking driver, and the whole thing costs €110 a head. Over the Tizi n'Tichka pass to Aït Ben Haddou, a night in the rose town at Kelaat M'Gouna, then the Dades Valley, Todra Gorge and a camel ride into the Erg Chebbi dunes. Day three climbs back out through the Ziz Valley, the cedar forest at Azrou and Ifrane, into Fes by evening. About 1,150 km in three days. Departures run every day and there is no single supplement, so a solo traveller pays exactly what everyone else pays.
The minibus collects you early and Marrakech is gone within twenty minutes. The road
climbs into the High Atlas and keeps climbing to the Tizi n'Tichka pass at 2,260 m —
the highest road in Morocco. On the far side the green goes out of the landscape and
the earth turns red. Aït Ben Haddou appears around a bend: a fortified village of
packed earth, UNESCO-listed since 1987, where Gladiator and Game of Thrones were
filmed. Ouarzazate and its studios come next, then the palm groves of Skoura, and
the day ends at Kelaat M'Gouna — the rose town, where ten thousand kilometres of
Damask rose hedges flower for three weeks every May and the whole valley smells of
it.
The road east from the rose town is the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs, and the Dades
Valley is the best of it — the Monkey Fingers rising out of the rock, and the gorge
road switchbacking up behind them. An hour later the walls close in again at Todra:
300 metres of limestone narrowing to barely ten metres apart, with a stream running
down the middle and climbers on the rock above. Tinghir's palm grove runs thirty
kilometres along the river below the old kasbahs. Then the land flattens and empties
— black hammada, the occasional ksar, the fossil town of Erfoud — until the Erg
Chebbi dunes rise out of nothing on the horizon, 150 metres of them. The camels are
waiting at the foot. You ride in as the light goes orange, and eat under the stars
with the drums going.
First light over the Sahara, then the camels back out. Berber bread, olive oil and mint tea before you leave. Viewpoint over 20 km of palm trees cut into red rock. Lunch stop between the High and the Middle Atlas. Walk among 300-year-old cedars and wild Barbary macaques. The alpine town they call the Switzerland of Morocco. At your hotel or riad in Fes, between 19:30 and 20:30.
Nights in the desert drop to around 5 °C from November to March, and there can be snow at Ifrane in winter, so pack a warm layer — our Morocco desert packing list covers the rest, and the best time to visit Marrakech guide has the weather month by month. For €30 more the luxury camp gives you a private tent with its own en-suite bathroom — it is the one upgrade travellers tell us afterwards they wish they had taken. If you would rather set your own timings, the private Marrakech to Fes tour runs the same road on your schedule. If you need to finish back in Marrakech, take the shared Marrakech to Merzouga round trip instead. Or tell us your dates on the custom tour page.
