Sahara Desert Tour (Day 1) — Hannah & Christopher

Our 3 day desert tour - Marrakech to Fes

After spending a day in Marrakech, we started our journey to the Sahara desert. A lot of people have the misconception that the Sahara desert is fairly close the city, but in fact it takes about 10 hours to get there. So in order to make this experience a more relaxing journey, I decided to do a 4 day tour instead of 3. Unfortunately, because TAP cancelled the connecting flight and got us to Morocco the day after, we had to cut the trip short to 3 days.

Booking the tour

Booking this tour was a very interesting process to me. After reading about scams in Morocco, I had to be extra careful about running into fake tours. Anyone can say they are a tour guide so the local government, since 2015, created a list of approved tour guides to let the visitors know they are legit. During my research, I noticed there are TONS of desert tours. The tours are usually categorized to private tours and groups (with other strangers). The price also depends on whether you want to stay in a luxury tent or regular tent in the desert. I started to research Tripadvisor reviews but this was not much help either because almost 99% of them have 5 star reviews (which are likely fake). I looked at travel influencers on instagram and came across Salt in your Hair that had went to do a short desert tour. They recommended this tour Desert Day Tour and also provided a discount code so we went with them. Thanks to the discount code, we were able to book a private tour with a luxury tent.

Day 1

Our tour started at 9:00 am sharp. Our driver, who also doubles as our tour guide picked us up at our riad and we started our long drive to the Merzouga desert. We had a couple stops along the way to take some photos and bathroom breaks. There were also lots of twists and turns due to the mountains that we where driving on the side of.

Dades Gorges via the Tizi-n-Tichka

Our first major stop was the panoramic view of the infamous Dades Gorges mountain pass. As we were driving up, the roads were pretty narrow with sharp turns (this reminded us of the drive in Hana Road, Hawaii). It was not so terrifying as people mentioned but made us (especially Chris) super dizzy. Our driver was definitely experienced and he just went up so fast as if was like driving on rainbow road in Mario Kart.

Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou

We continued our long drive going past the ancient High Atlas Berber villages reaching to Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou. We stopped by a restaurant to have lunch (lemon chicken tajine) before we were handed-off to a private tour guide to lead us up to the Kasbah.

After our lunch, we met our guide who would lead us up a small mountain to the Kasbah. It was around 1:00 pm at this time so it was extremely hot. It was 40 degrees Celsius with no shade so hiking up was quite a challenge. Along our trek, we stopped by a shop filled with paintings. It was a common practise of Berber artists in southern Morocco to use an invisible ink (lemon juice), paint it on a white piece of paper and gently put the paper over the flame of a small propane tank. Like magic, the illustrations slowly became visible in brown. This is sometimes called pyro aquarelles.

We worked our way up to the Kasbah where we can see the panoramic view of Ait-Ben-Haddou.

The numerous houses in this town are made of clay and its standard for families to all live together in the same house. For large neighbouring families, it’s not uncommon to construct a link/tunnel between properties which ends up creating mini compounds of the same family all living in a series of buildings.

Ait-Ben-Haddou seems like a small city you would see in a period adventure movie, and you would be correct. Many movies have been filmed here over the years, two of personal note to Chris are Jewel of the Nile (The fake wall that a fighter jet slams through is still standing in the below photo to the bottom left) and Gladiator. In this town, the small gladiatorial ring that Russell Crowe battles in was built in this town. The structure was since been deconstructed by the film crew, but the open area it was built in has been left untouched since then.

Atlas Studios

Our driver then brought us to Atlas studios, the local movie lot with sound stages. Historically, many of the movie crews that shot in this region left most of their sets and props in the desert. Only in the past 20 years has it been required by law for film crews to remove everything they bring to shoot. The upside of all these lazy film crews leaving things behind is Atlas Studios went out and collected an immense number of movie props and sets which they moved into their studio and now charge tourists an admission to take a tour of their collection. However, our driver told us the admission price had recently gone up and it wasn’t worth the steep price given what they had on the tour. Chris got to see the fighter jet from Jewel of the Nile which was close to the front gate and after taking a couple of photos, we left.

Entrance Fee: 80DH

Riad TazaWa

Part of our tour included a night’s stay in a riad in the middle of a small town that was fairly tucked away off the beaten path. What was great about this riad was it felt more like a relaxing getaway since it was in the middle of the country opposed to the other riads we stayed in which were in the middle of dense urban areas. Spending the late afternoon here after a fairly intense hike in the sun was the best possible thing. The host of this riad was a young guy with a great sense of humour and was pretty quick-witted despite a minor language barrier. The decor was stunning and felt like you where spending the night at a family cottage. The home-cooked meal was one of the more creative ones we had on our trip and overall, it was one of the highlights of our tour.