A desert tour from Marrakech to Merzouga that ends in Fes, not back where it started

Almost every question people ask about this trip is really a question about something else. How many days, which camp, how much walking on sand: all of that matters, and all of it comes after one thing. Do you come back to Marrakech, or do you not?

What the loop is. Seventeen of the twenty listings here are loops. You leave Marrakech, drive over the High Atlas, spend the night in a camp behind the first crest of dunes at Erg Chebbi, and then drive the same road home. It is the right shape if Marrakech is your base, if your flight leaves from there, or if you have a hotel room in the medina with the rest of your luggage in it.

What the one way is. Three listings take the road out and then keep going. Instead of turning west on the final morning they turn north, up the Ziz valley and through the cedar forest around Ifrane, and set you down in Fes. A desert tour from Marrakech to Merzouga booked in this shape is two products in one: the desert itself, and the long transfer between the two cities most first-time visitors to Morocco want to see.

Why the distance is the argument. Merzouga is around 560 km from Marrakech, and the road crosses the High Atlas to get there. Nobody drives that in an afternoon. On a loop you pay for it twice in time, once in each direction, and the second crossing shows you the same pass and the same kasbah in the same order. On the one-way version that day becomes new country instead. That is the entire trade, and it is worth more than the $37 that separates the cheapest way across from the cheapest loop.

When the loop still wins. When you have a room and a bag waiting in Marrakech. When you fly out of Marrakech. When you have already booked a night back there. Under any of those, a desert tour from Marrakech to Merzouga that leaves you in Fes creates a problem it did not solve, because you then have to get yourself back down — and that is a train or a flight, not part of any listing on this site.

Every operator here drives the same route out, because there is essentially one road. What changes between listings is the vehicle, the camp and the meals, not the sequence below. Knowing the sequence is the best way to read any itinerary you are shown.

The pass over the High Atlas. The road climbs to Tizi n’Tichka at 2,260 m and comes down the other side into a different country: stone instead of gardens, long views instead of walls. In the cold months there is snow on the tops here. This is the part of the drive people remember from the first day of a desert tour from Marrakech to Merzouga, and it is also the part where the minibus stops most often, because everybody wants to stand and look.

Ait Ben Haddou. A clay kasbah stacked up a hillside above the Ounila river, and a UNESCO site. You walk up through it. It is the single most photographed stop on the road and it deserves the reputation: the building material is the hill it stands on, which is why it looks like geology rather than architecture.

Ouarzazate. Called the gate of the desert, and the town with the film studios. For most itineraries it is a stop rather than a stay, and that is the honest way to describe it — you pass through, you see where the studios are, and the road carries on east.

The Dades Valley and Todra Gorge. Red walls up to 300 m with a river along the bottom of them. The road goes into the gorge and out again, and it is the best hour of the second morning on almost every listing. If you want one reason beyond the sand to spend three days on this route rather than two, this is it.

Merzouga and the dunes. The tarmac ends and the sand begins, and at Erg Chebbi it stands in a wall up to 150 m high. This is the only place in Morocco where it does that. Camps sit behind the first crest, which is why no ordinary car reaches them: the last stretch is done on a camel or in the operator’s four-wheel-drive.

This is the section that decides the page, because everything else about the three one-way listings is identical to the loops. The difference is one morning, and what that morning contains.

The Ziz valley. The road north out of the desert follows a river through a corridor of palms with bare rock on both sides. It is a completely different landscape from the one you drove in through, and it is the reason the last day of a Merzouga tour from Marrakech to Fes does not feel like a transfer even though that is exactly what it is doing.

Ifrane and the cedars. Higher up, the country turns green and cold and the forest is cedar. Ifrane sits in it. Coming from the dunes, arriving in a forest of tall conifers the same day is the sort of contrast that is hard to believe until the window shows it to you.

Fes. The itinerary ends in the city, and you are in it with your bags rather than nine hours away from it. Whatever you had planned for Fes starts that evening instead of two days later. For a traveller working north through Morocco, a desert tour from Marrakech to Merzouga arranged this way is the cheapest long-distance transfer in the country that also happens to be a holiday.

What it costs you. Time, mostly. The last day is a long one on the road, because Fes is a long way from the dunes. And one practical thing: you cannot leave a suitcase behind in Marrakech, because you are not going back for it. Everything comes with you, into the camp and out of it, so pack for that rather than for a room you will return to.

What nobody can tell you. What the sky will be doing on any of the three days. The desert has cloud and sand in the air in the cold months and heat in high summer, and no listing on this site promises a particular morning. What the listings do state in writing is Free cancellation, with the window printed on the page you book.

Twenty listings end in a night in a desert camp, and they divide into groups that are easy to hold in your head once somebody names them.

Three finish in Fes. $100, $102 and $145. Together they hold 613 reviews at 4.9, 4.9 and 4.8. These are the ones this page is about.

One runs it backwards. $188, out of Fes and into Marrakech, 4.7 across 140 reviews. Same road, opposite direction.

Sixteen are loops. That is where the volume of this site sits. $137 carries 22,054 reviews at 4.9, which is more than every other listing here put together; $120 holds 14,306 at 4.7 with meals included, and $99 holds 6,429 at 4.6. The floor of the whole site is $63, and the ceiling is $256 for four days and two nights out at the dunes.

So which do you book? Match the shape of the listing to the shape of your week rather than to its review count. If Fes is next, book one of the three that end there and do not let 22,054 reviews on a loop talk you into paying for a day of driving you did not need. If Marrakech is where you sleep afterwards, the loops are cheaper, better evidenced and simpler.