Fourteen Hours to the Sahara Desert
Morocco Road Trip
Some days are just about covering ground. Fourteen hours of it, from the Atlantic coast to the edge of the Sahara, through the dark, over the Atlas, and into a landscape that makes everything before it feel like a warm-up. We left Essaouira at two in the morning and arrived in Merzouga at four in the afternoon. In between: one sleeping coffee vendor, one spooked camel, and a bathroom that redefined the concept of soap.
The alarm went off at 01:45.
You do not ease into a day that starts at 01:45. You just get up and go.
Out of the Medina
We packed in the dark, moving quietly through the riad the way you do when you are the only ones awake, and the walls are thick but not that thick. Bags down the stairs, shoes in hand until we hit the street, door pulled shut behind us.
The medina of Essaouira at two in the morning is a different city. The alleys that had been full of vendors, mopeds, and noise the day before were completely empty, lit by the occasional wall lamp, the cobblestones still damp from the evening. Our footsteps echoed. Cats watched us from ledges and doorways with the mild interest of creatures who own the place at this hour and know it. We walked to the car without seeing a single person, loaded up, and drove out through the gate.
By two, we were on the road south.
The Sleeping Coffee Man
Just before Marrakech, somewhere around four in the morning, a coffee van appeared at the side of the road. The owner was inside, asleep, snoring loudly enough that I could hear him through the window. I knocked. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. I started the car to leave, and he woke up immediately.
He was not annoyed. He made the coffee, handed it through the window, took the money, and went back to his chair. Hot, strong, exactly what the moment needed. I pulled back onto the empty road and kept going.
A few kilometers later, a police checkpoint. The officer looked at the car, then at the passenger seat, then asked what was under the jacket. The jacket moved. Peggy’s face appeared, confirmed it was human, and disappeared again. We were waved through.
Over the Atlas
The N9 climbs into the Atlas in a way that demands your full attention. Not because it is dangerous, exactly, but because it does not forgive distraction: tight hairpin bends stacked one above the other, the road switching back on itself repeatedly as it gains altitude, no barrier between you and the valley dropping away below. In daylight, it would be spectacular. In the dark, at four in the morning, it was more like an extended exercise in concentration.
The temperature dropped steadily as we climbed. By the time we were deep into the pass, the dashboard showed freezing, the heater was running hard, and there was nothing outside the headlights but rock face and the next bend.
At around five, the sky started to lighten. Snow on the peaks. The mountain faces appearing out of the dark on both sides, vast and indifferent. We had driven through all of it without seeing any of it, and catching it now in the early grey light felt like a small reward for the night’s work.
The First Town: Coffee and the Soap Question
We stopped in the first town on the other side of the pass. After a night behind the wheel and several hours of mountain road, nature was calling firmly enough that no further discussion was needed.
The café had a terrace, hot coffee, tea for Peggy, and a bathroom in the back. The bathroom had a soap dispenser. The soap inside it was so comprehensively dirty that washing your hands with it would have been a lateral move at best. We assessed the situation, accepted our limitations, and returned to the terrace. Some mornings, you are just glad to be on the right side of the mountain.
We sat for twenty minutes, said very little, and got back in the car.
The Long Haul
The rest of the day settled into its own rhythm. Drive, stop for coffee, drive, stop for a gendarmerie checkpoint, answer the same questions politely, get waved through, drive again. The landscape changed steadily as we moved east and south: the green of the Atlas giving way to plateaus, the plateaus to something flatter and more ochre, the vegetation thinning until the ground was mostly stone and the sky was doing all the work. Morocco is a large country. A fourteen-hour drive makes sure you understand this personally.
By the time Merzouga appeared, it was four in the afternoon. A driver from Kam Kam Dunes was waiting in the village. I followed him out into the dunes, parked where the road stopped making sense, and climbed out of the car for the first time in what felt like a geological era.
Camp
The tent was not what the word tent usually implies. A proper bed, genuinely comfortable, the kind of comfortable you notice specifically after fourteen hours of driving. Real furniture, curtains, lantern light, and outside the canvas walls, nothing but dunes and silence. We dropped our bags and went straight out for the camel ride.
There were several of us in the group, strung out in a line across the Sahara sand dunes, the camels moving in that rocking, unhurried way they have. The light was doing what desert light does at that hour: turning everything gold, then orange, then something deeper. It was exactly as good as it sounds.
Then, somewhere behind us, one of the camels spooked. Nobody caught exactly what caused it. The camel moved sharply, the American woman on its back came off, and the tour was over. She was evacuated from the dunes, shaken but not seriously hurt. The rest of us turned back in the fading light.
Dinner was a tagine that arrived hot and tasted like someone had been cooking it all day, which they probably had. We ate, went to the tent, and I was asleep before the desert had fully gone quiet.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!