Private 4-Day Marrakech to Merzouga desert tour

Your driver guide comes to your hotel or riad, loads the vehicle and heads southeast out of the city. Coffee stop once the climbing starts, and the first Berber villages within the hour.

The highest paved pass in Morocco, and the wall that separates two countries in one. North of it, walnut trees and green terraces. South of it, bare rock the colour of rust and villages the same shade as the ground they stand on. We stop at the viewpoints that deserve it, not at every stall.

First sight of the ksar from the river, and lunch on a terrace facing it. The full guided walk inside is saved for day 4, when you come back through with the morning free and the crowds gone, so today is about the view and the food.

A short stop in the town that has doubled for Tibet, Rome, Egypt and Somalia in half the films you have seen. Atlas Film Studios sits on the edge of it if you want the detour, otherwise we keep moving east.

Here is where this itinerary starts to differ from the short one. Skoura is a palm grove with several hundred kasbahs scattered through it, and Amridil is the one restored well enough to explain the rest. A local guide takes you through the courtyards, the oil press and the granary, and shows you the irrigation system that has been moving water between these gardens since the Middle Ages.

The valley around Kelaat M’Gouna grows Damascus roses in hedges along the field edges. In April and May the whole road smells of them and the harvest is in full swing. Outside those weeks it is the distilleries and cooperatives that make the stop, and they are open all year.

East along the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs to Tinghir, an oasis town wedged between bare mountains, with a green strip of gardens running below the old village. A short walk along the water channels before the gorge, if you want it.

Limestone walls 300 metres high with a flat riverbed between them, cool and shaded even in July. Because today is short on driving, you have time to walk the whole passage instead of turning around at the first bend, watch the climbers on the north face and wait for the light to reach the bottom. Lunch at the gorge afterwards.

The ground around Erfoud is packed with 350 million year old marine fossils, and the workshops here cut and polish it into slabs and tables. Worth twenty minutes to see the saws at work, whether or not you want to carry a piece home.

The Alaouite dynasty that still rules Morocco started here, and the town keeps the old caravan feel, especially on market days when the donkey park fills up before the stalls do. This is also where the tarmac starts to lose its argument with the sand.

The dunes come up out of the flat ground like a range of hills that arrived overnight. You leave the vehicle at the edge, get on a camel, and walk in for the last hour of daylight while the sand runs through gold and amber into deep rose.

Out before the light for the ride back over the crest. Cold, completely silent, and the twenty minutes when the sand turns from blue to gold are the ones people photograph most and describe least well afterwards.

Breakfast at camp, back to Merzouga village to meet your driver, and onto a road you have not driven yet. Everything from here to Marrakech is new ground.

Southwest across the volcanic massifs of the Anti Atlas, black stone and long empty horizons, until the road drops into Nkob. The village counts more than forty kasbahs in one valley, which is more than anywhere else in the country, and almost nobody stops to look at them.

The Draa is the longest river in Morocco and for a long stretch it is also the only green thing in sight. Palm groves on both banks, gardens under the trees, and ksour built out of the same earth they stand on. Lunch somewhere along the valley with the palms in front of you.

Agdz means resting place, and that is exactly what it was for the caravans coming up from Timbuktu with the Jbel Kissane standing over the town. The Kasbah of Tamnougalt just outside it is one of the oldest in the valley and can be visited if the timing works.

Half an hour up the road, and this time you go inside. A village guide leads you across the river and up through the alleys to the granary on the summit, where the whole valley opens out below. On the UNESCO list since 1987, and the set for Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia and a good deal of Game of Thrones, though the place holds up perfectly well without the film credits.

The old caravan road climbs to Telouet, where Thami El Glaoui built himself a palace and ran southern Morocco from it until 1956. The outside is falling apart. The rooms that survive are covered floor to ceiling in zellige, carved plaster and painted cedar, and you will usually have them almost to yourself. This stop exists on the four day route only, because the three day tour crosses the Atlas from the wrong direction to reach it.

The Tizi n’Tichka a second time, in afternoon light and from the opposite side, which makes it a different road than the one you took on Monday morning. Argan cooperative stop on request.