I rented a lifted, 2023 Land Cruiser Prado TX out of Marrakech for a week to recce and update the sandier desert routes between Foum Zguid and Erg Chebbi. I made the right decision: doing this area alone on the bike would be been too risky and tiring with the constant logging required. I couldn’t have covered the distances we did in the car.
The Toyota of course didn’t miss a beat. A TX is automatic but with a Sport (sequential) shift to keep it in one of the four gears; handy in tricky dunes and other technical sections. About the size on an 80 series (ie: big), it returned 9-10kpl (compared to 15kpl in a lighter Duster). Still, I’m glad we went for the nuclear option. Though we hardly used low range, it was good to have it there, along with the TX’s reassuring reputation. Amazingly, we paired an iPhone with the display in seconds via Apple/AirPlay (not possible on the Duster), but could not plug in a USB stick to play mp3s, which the Duster easily allowed. It probably could have been done via the phone, too.
At one point we decided to do a Body Twist Test: getting two diagonal wheels airborne to verify clean door shutting. If a body twists under this static tension with two corners unloaded, doors will not close or open freely, even if the separate chassis is twisting a little (as it should). But even with all doors open, the TX passed with flying colours; not a mil of body deflection in the shut-lines. As you’d expect from a Land Cruiser.
And yet, despite the big rubber seal, the TX sucked in dust from the back door or somewhere. This was perhaps the biggest irritation, but is the same in any car with a flat-backed tailgate. I get less dusty on a motorbike. I recall we taped up the back vents in my HJ61, over 20 years ago, but with little success. At high speeds on dusty tracks, I suppose the low pressure across the rear of the car is too great. Anyway, we covered all the routes I planned to do and even a little bit more, and overall the trip was a bit more comfortable in the Prado (partly due to the reduced ‘will-it/won’t-it’ stress). Our TX cost €110/day (down from €150 last year); Dusters are now €50/day from Medloc). A few pics from out 1500-km recce.
To paraphrase the cop addressing Jack Nicholson’s character at the end of Chinatown: ‘Forget it Jake, it’s the internet.’
Exactly where does the iconic and eminently Instagramable majesty of Sahara start in Morocco? Like Keyser Söze, is it even there at all? Years ago I came across an internet forum argument on the now defunct LP Thorn Tree (I gave my 2ç then left them to it). There, a couple of know-alls lambasted the callow innocents daring to enquire where they could ‘see the Sahara in Morocco’ – in most cases referring to the famous Erg Chebbi dunes. ‘I told you: there is no Sahara in Morocco!’. All concerned have now migrated to TripAdvisor from where the quotes below were copied. It staggers me that some of these individuals can assert their unsubstantiated beliefs with such conviction, but such are the times. According to one of TA’s wise owls, ‘Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara‘. So the Sahara is ringed by an unnamed desert that is not the Sahara?
… neither … Erg Chebbi/Erg Chigaga are the Sahara. For that you need to head to Western Sahara. Ok, we know that but we want just see Sahara and ride camel The limit of the Sahara is classified by the limit of the Date Palms the Sahara,… lies 100 km or more to the south in Algeria. Although not part of the Sahara , the dunes are pretty amazing. It also corresponds to the 100mm isohyet in the north and the 150mm isohyet in the south. Long term average rainfall. A further definition is where the evaporation potential exceeds the presipitation [sic]. I don’t care what “Sahara” means. I am talking about the actual geographical boundaries of the area. And your definition of those boundaries is as incorrect and misleading as that of the ridiculous tour companies’ one. Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara. If you by reading see on website about Sahara tour, then it is only marketing to attract customers. But Sahara begin first in Algeria or you have to go to the South of Guelmim, to Western Sahara. Here we go again with the “Erg (Chebbi/Chiggaga) is not the Sahara” brigade. What’s wrong with you? What’s a few hundred miles between friends? Jesus H. Christ. May I just make one thing clear? You will not be travelling through the Sahara desert until you have gone south of La’ayoune. References to the Sahara in other places such as Erg Chebbi and so on are simply concoctions dreamt up by tour companies to fool their victims into thinking that they have been to the Sahara – they haven’t. To the east, the Sahara starts way over the other side of the border, deep into Algeria. the Sahara if [sic] 100’s of kilometers away from the big dune areas over the border in Algeria and not in Morocco [continues] ... [Chebbi] is more spectacular than any of the places in the Moroccan Sahara that I have visited.
This way please.
This knotty problem of the Sahara’s precise extent may be unique to Morocco. You start with the very concept’s compelling mystique. It’s hard to think of other wilderness regions that conjure up such strong imagery and notions, maybe because it’s so close to Europe compared to other iconic wastelands. Then you mix in the unceasing clash between gullible bucket listers wanting to definitively tick off the Sahara – and devious local tour ops who promise the earth and deliver a turd. One wily tour agency has even managed to insert themself as a ‘reference’ on Wiki’s ‘Sahara desert (ecoregion)’ page. This seems to be the angled grinder which the naysayers above fixate on: if some Moroccan cat in an oversized cheche strolls up and says ‘Hello my friend. Come, we will drink tea with nomads and I will show you Sahara’, you can expect to be a little disappointed.
As with all geographical features (seas, mountains, etc), it’s tempting but futile to apply fixed boundaries to their precise extent, as if they were a country. Where exactly does the Southern Ocean become the Atlantic? Where does the Karakoram become the Himalaya, or the High Atlas become the Anti Atlas for that matter (along the N10 highway, of course!).
It’s only rain
It’s the same with hot deserts, commonly defined as arid regions with less than 100mm of average annual precipitation. Unlike a sea shore, there can be no finite edges identifying this change in rainfall; to imply otherwise would be absurd. In this way the NOAA map (above) is rather more nuanced, showing blurred transitions, not fixed isohyets (rainfall contours) between regions. Both the hard-edged yellow and red maps below could benefit from the same idea.
Sahara map from Wiki The hyper-arid Saharan core from another Wiki
Chebbi-aye-yay
According to this ridiculous website, (sadly, the first that popped up on my Google) it appears to rain every other day in Merzouga/Erg Chebbi. (The ‘sea temperature’ there gets pretty balmy too – or maybe they mean ‘sand sea’). This source for Merzouga looks rather more plausible: 65mm. Another estimates 53mm. yet another 172mm. This French Wiki gives 59mm. Let’s assume it’s not Kew Gardens down there and it comes in under a 100 mil most years.
Another map with a red zone straying over the Moroccan border. Can’t be right! Source
Archway into the desert, south of Guelmim (iirc)
Not all accept the level of aridity as a definition (‘I don’t care what “Sahara” means…‘), but they don’t cite any sources to explain their assertions about the Sahara’s boundaries. Instead, some of the TA dolts avow the Sahara lies ‘100km south of Erg Chebbi’ (ie: in Algeria). Others insist ‘200 miles’ from Chebbi. Final answer: ‘100’s of kilometers away’. Some even proclaim they magically entered the Sahara at Guelmim in western Morocco because ‘it is officially known as ‘The Gateway to the Sahara’’, surely a bald, tourist-oriented claim in a town famously thick with faux Tuaregs.
Leaving the clammy Tropics. Scorchio!
Others insist that, to be in the Sahara in Morocco, you must go ‘beyond Layounne’ (left), a fairly boring road trip, even for a dedicated bucketeer. What will they see on the way there? It may look like a desert, walk like a desert and quack like a desert, but it sure won’t be the Sahara! No matter – give it a few decades because it’s said the climate in Morocco will see the Sahara creep over the berm and into Morocco.
You can see why some of your forum know-alls get cynical, myself included, even if I believe they’re dying on the wrong hill on this one. Lately, some canny marketing has designated an area of eroded wasteland ever so conveniently close to Marrakech’s gated resorts as ‘the Agafay Desert’ or ‘le petit Sahara’ which ‘extends over several hundred acres’. There you can do all your favourite deserty things: sip tea in a tent, wear a cheche or ride camels, quads and 4x4s across a landscape where the barren rounded hillocks of dried mud resemble dunes. Insta heaven!
Some academics have sought to reclassify the liminal sweep in question as the ‘North Saharan steppe and woodlands‘. Aka: the edge of the Sahara where things gradually become less arid, like the Sahel in the south. But looking at the zone on the map below, ‘woodland’ is not a word which springs to mind. The band encompasses the vast Grand Erg Oriental spreading across Algeria (left) and southern Tunisia – about as Saharan an expanse anyone could wish for which would swallow up hundreds of Chebbis. The only woodland here is of the petrified fossil variety, west of Hassi bel Guebbour.
Selima
Me? Having travelled much of the Sahara over the last five decades, if you pushed me blindfolded out the back of a Hilux behind Erg Chebbi and removed the hood, I’d get up, smell the air, squint at the sun and guess I was in the Sahara. It may transpire to be the edge of the Sahara in boring old Marrokie, because vegetation and rainfall change in a very short distance (by Saharan standards) in the mountains to north. But from Chebbi south and west along the Algerian border all the way to Tan Tan, it all resembles the Sahara I’ve seen – often dreary, sometimes epic, often barren, vegetated in patches, hyper arid elsewhere – all the way from Mauritania’s Adrar plateau to the Selima Sand Sheet (left) close to the Nile.
Camels? Dunes? Palms? What else could be be?
If anything, Erg Chebbi is just too darn Saharan for school and so has become one trampled terminus of Morocco’s Axis of Tourism, a quad-busting desert resort. I avoid the place. Over the years the pretty cluster of dunes at the end of the road has become choked with desert camps, kasbah-hotels, a few opportunist sharks and us tourists doing the dunes by various means. In that sense it is very much not what I know of the real Sahara, but caught right, Chebbi can still be an amazing sight for a desert first timer. You’re on the very edge of the Sahara. Which side you’re on is up to you.
… until Tizi n Telouet: there, all greenery ceases; the burning breath of southern winds denudes the mountain’s rocky skeleton. Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884
While scanning aerial mapping for new pistes in the High Atlas I came across an intriguing possibility. A seemingly good track lead 24km off the N9 via a village or two to the 2450-mTizi Telouet pass on the High Atlas watershed (31.3372, -7.2663), a few miles east of the Tichka pass on the N9 trans Atlas. From that point southwards the way ahead was an obliterated mule path, but picked up rideable terrain in just two kilometres, with Telouet town visible nearby. Downhill on a light bike, walking where necessary, it might be doable, no? ‘Who wants to go first?’, I quipped on Twitter.
Once it was mule trains of salt from Telouet’s mines, but today, like the grand old Duke of York and his 10,000 men, a column of pylons marches up and over the col, bringing power from the massive Nour solar plant, 50km away near Ouarzazate. You’d assume some sort of vehicle crawled up the slopes to erect the pylons, but no service track is evident on the south side. Still, at the very least, riding the switchbacks up to the col for a quick look might be possible. In my experience damage from water run-off gets less severe the higher you go, as the volume, momentum and sludge density all decrease with elevation. The real damage gets done down in the valleys.
I mentioned this recce to a mate who’ll join me out there next week. He soon found some Spanish KTM-ers – a YT channel called Enduro Aventura – who pulled off the Tizi n’Telouet descent (and a whole lot more) in 2002, filmed it all and capped it off with a tracklog on Wikiloc, classified as ‘Very Difficult’. They call the Tizi Telouet ‘Collado Torretas’ or ‘tower/pylon col’? They confirm ‘the north face has been fixed with a track with a thousand curves and somewhat broken by the rain‘ but continue… ‘thesouth face on the way to Telouet is a narrow and broken trail with a lot of stones… This hill [trail] seems to be disappearing…‘. They speculate that a new road might get put in as the truncated northside track suggests, but I’ve found tracks or roads often come to a dead halt at provincial boundaries, which this watershed is. The col was just an efficient, ‘as-the-crow-flies’ route for the power cables from Nour to Marrakech.
On the track to Tizi n’Telouet. Though we knew we’d never manage the descent with my 300L, let alone James’ 890, we had half a mind to reach the col for a look, so took the track at Ait n Amer off the N9. We did a few clicks but realistically, it was late in the day and we probably wouldn’t have got back to the N9 before dark.
Their 80-minute vid below is timed to start at the Collado Torretas stage (covering just a few minutes). It’s soon turns gnarly af (stills above). But scan any other random minute in the vid and you’ll see just what light and lightly-loaded KTMs (including 2T) can achieve off-road in the hands of a fit and determined crew. You’ll be staggered to see what these guys blithely attempt. Chapeau to Enduro Aventura I say! The Men who Ride like Goats. Me, I think I’ll take the long way round.
As we all know, there are a lot of moto vlogging know-alls out there whose sketchy credentials don’t necessarily affect their channel’s popularity. But in a well produced 9-minute vid on sand riding, this guy below gets it and keeps to the point. He won me over when he advised: ‘if you see a patch of sand on the road, avoid it if you can’; ‘hop off and push when you must’ and ‘you can get away with less airing down on knobbly tyres’ [because traction is innately better]. That said, I don’t know what GS12 tyres runs normally, but I was surprised he recommended two bar (29psi) on the sands. Even just 5psi less would make a big difference, but perhaps that bike’s huge weight has something to do with it. I bet there’s at least another 9 minutes of bogged-down outtakes ;-)
The film’s setting in a low-risk play area of small dunes drops the ante somewhat, but that’s probably where most curious big-bike riders would start – and very soon get it out of their system. Engaged in a long-distance travel adventure, like our 2003 Desert Riders trip across Algeria and into the Tenere Desert (below), I would add.
Avoid big dunes, where possible – it’s not a game
Keep out of sandy car ruts, where possible [rarely so, that’s why they form]
If you can’t, air down to 1.5 bar and deploy all the tips the video mentions
Metal side cases? What were we thinking?! Go soft off road
Overlanding in the desert, once you add the need to keep tabs on navigation, water, fuel and energy levels, your fellow riders, and even visa durations, it all becomes quite a challenge. Which is why, without support, you don’t want to add avoidable technical difficulties when it comes to terrain. Bike or 4×4, in my experience dunes are where all the accidents happen. That’s how Desert Riders ended for me ;-)
In November the Mrs flew in between my moto tours and we hired another Morocco-built Duster from Medloc Marrakech to scout routes for the M4 book, covering the western corner of Morocco to the Atlantic and within an hour of Smara. Only this time they had a 2023 model with just 14,000km on the clock, but still just €65 a day – about half the price of a Toyota TXL. For more on the rental experience and my unchanged pros and cons, read Duster 1 from earlier this year when we drove a 100,000-km far, but got little done due to preceding rains having damaged many roads and tracks. By the time we got this newer model all the tracks we tried to do and more were in great shape, and so were able to push the car less hard.
A Duster can restore you cynicism in the SUV craze by having genuinely utility on regular tracks (but see below), plus enough power to sit at 130kph on the desert highway – as fast as you’d want to go with camels roaming about. At the same time it’ll reliably do up to 45mpg or 15kpl giving a massive 800km range. And these modern diesels are quite amazing: torquey, quiet and nippy. With an auto box it would have been even better.
On our one the air-con actually cooled properly which was a relief, the switches and dash have been re-organised, but the fitted satnav was bogus. Yes there was a map displaying our position on an unnamed road or track most of the time, but there was no other info at all and no routing function. This confused us until we read you have to visit the Renault (Dacia’s owners) website to download a map/app? onto a USB stick or some such. You couldn’t even pair a smartphone screen (or we failed). Be warned: unless we got something wrong you will need your own nav device. We had my Garmin Montana, as well as a more readable Samsung tablet running Gaia maps (above). I did happen to have my music on a USB stick and that system worked intuitively, through the speakers are not the best.There was music pairing off one iPhone too.
Toyota’s Prado TXL is the other main 4×4 rental in Morocco but tough though it may be by reputation, the autos can be comparatively portly slugs and unless lifted (left), are also bottom scrapers. As it is, I’d not be surprised if the 1.5 litre, 110-hp 6-speed TD Duster has a superior power to weight ratio than a TXL. It certainly takes off and overtakes effortlessly out on the road and handles bends well thanks to anti-roll bars. Only for deep sand or exceedingly rocky climbs – rare or avoidable in Morocco – might a Prado’s Low Range be needed.
Within hours we got a flat on the ropey Tizi n Test road, luckily just as we stopped in Ijoukak for supplies and close to a tyre repair shop. This was a bit worrying on the road; were the Continental tyres cheapies? I had the means to plug flats with a spike/worm, but better to get a shop to remove a tyre and vulcanise a patch from the inside.
We had another flat in Tan Tan Plage which needed the spare fitting to drive to the tyre shop. This spare is speed limited to 120kph which seems fast enough, and looked the same size tyre, but on a steel rim. Note that the scissor jack has only just enough reach to lift the rear, and be careful about positioning it correctly until the metal sill, not the plastic trim.
Off road obviously you take it easy in a rental when alone in the desert. So many SUVs, even AWDs have disastrous frontal overhangs but I never scraped the front or rear bumpers driving in and out of ditches or oueds. Same with the ramp clearance. But as before, the ‘axle’ clearance is oddly not as good as it looks and you find yourself having to straddle ruts to one side (above) to maintain clearance. A full tank may not help, but we just had two bags in the back. As you can see below it’s quite tidy and nothing sticks out – it must be down to the plush suspension so you just need to slow down to limit compression and contact. We left the tyres are 2 bar road pressures.
The scraping was frequent until I got a feel for the clearance but the noise is probably amplified by the protection hardware, and we’re talking piled rocks, not solid impacts. Dust crept into the covered boot space so the rear hatch door seal may not be so good. Had I remembered, I’d have done that trick of parking on a bank with one wheel in the air, then closed/opened a door to evaluate body twist as we did with th TXl a few months later. Door closing cleanly = good stiffness.
In 3000km I probably turned on ‘4WD Lock‘ for about 500 metres, mostly to spread traction while crawling out of stony oueds and on one sandy climb in the wastes of Western Sahara.
All up, I’d happily rent a Duster again from Medloc. If you have experience driving 4x4s effectively you soon recognise the limits of a Duster (largely no Low Range). If you’re new to off-road but want to go in hard, you might feel better in an automatic Toyota. Having done a few thousand kilometres in both over the last year, for normal road and track exploring, a Duster is more than adequate and better value for money.
In a line If you have the previous edition, save your money – this time round they’ve made more changes to the cover than the actual map itself.
Note: in December 2022 a traveller had his RKH mapconfiscated at the Ceuta border because it showed ‘Western Sahara‘ – (like all other paper maps, afaik). Actually the back cover (see below right) always gave the impression it is all Moroccan territory, but inside they mark the ‘Moroccan Wall’ and the Polisario ‘Free Zone’, which is correct and more detail than most maps, but might also get up the Moroccans’ noses.
For the very latest mapping digital, OSM updated by users (used by Garmin and many others) is useful. But not everyone gets on with digital maps which are far from perfect of accurate, At the planning stage you can’t beat a paper map spread out before you. Out of habit I routinely carry a 2019 RKH out there, though almost never refer to it now as i know all the southern roads. I have much more success finding unknown pistes as well as verifying newly sealed roads from aerial imagery. As you can read here, the German Morocco Reise Know-How (RK-H) is one of the least bad paper maps for Morocco. It’s double-sided, the plastic paper is tear-proof and compact at 70 x 100cm, and it has an intuitive 1:1m scale (1mm = 1km). They also show both old/new road numbers which changed in 2018, but unlike Europe, this information is of little use in Morocco (* see bottom of page). In 2023 RK-H published the 13th edition of this map. The big question is, given the amount of road-building going on in Morocco, is it a properly updated edition like the previous one, or just a new cover with a few updates, as Michelin like to do? The answer is that in the south there appear to be virtually no changes to the actual mapping in the 2023 edition.
What they say Reise Know-How maps are characterized by particularly stable plastic paper that can be written on like paper, even with a pencil. The cardboard cover is detachable so that the card can easily be slipped into any pocket. A protective cover is not required. The cartographic presentation focuses on the most important information for travelers and is particularly easy to read. Colored elevation layers are used instead of hillshading.
Contour lines with elevation information
Colored elevation layers
Classified road network with distance information
Sightseeing features
Detailed local index
GPS accurate
degrees of longitude and latitude
Legend in five languages (German, English, French, Spanish, Russian)
Einklinker Western Sahara
Larger places also in Arabic script
With the 2023 edition laid out alongside my crumpled 2019, what’s new? The cover; that’s about it, but it does include a redesign of the back cover too! Even the decorative pictures on the northern side of the map are unchanged. I may have missed some of course, but a few minutes scanning familiar roads and pistes in the south brought up precisely two changes, maybe three. Everything else appears identical.
2019 – 2023; spot the difference. The notepad is tellingly blank.
1. What was a yellow ‘Secondary Road’ for Route ME4 (Korima Pass in Morocco Overland 3) has now changed to ‘Track’ although it was actually a ‘Gravel Road’ imo. It suggests a user’s correction was actioned, but ironically it’s now sealed up to KM41 or beyond. I bet there are many more sealed roads let alone tracks on the nearby Rekkam plateau. 2. Another former road they’ve admitted was a piste all along is the R704 (Route MH1) High Atlas crossing from Dades Gorge to Agoudal. Again, the irony is that piste is about to be sealed too! Thirdly, down in WS in the bottom left corner they switched ‘Laayoune’ with ‘El Aioun’ on the main panel in line with the inset; it was probably a typo.
In your dreams…
Elsewhere, right across the area I know well (not the north), pistes and even roads are still missing (Route MW6 to Labouriat) while many more pistes have become roads, in some cases over a decade ago, eg: Routes MW1/2/7 to Mseid; Route MH6 from Aguim as well as Routes MH7/8 south and west of Asakoun and Route MH4 Jebel Saro, etc, etc. Old edition and new, Route MS6 (left) is shown as a secondary road all the way to the Sidi Ali Tafraoute (bafflingly shown as a well: ‘Hassi Fougani’ on the map). Imagine arriving at the notorious Rheris crossing in your campervan! But west of Sidi Ali they miss out the well-used track carrying on directly to Zagora just south of Oum Jrane. And I’ve just noticed in the WS panel on both editions they’ve shown the 1000-km Tindouf Route as sealed all the way (via the PFZ no less) to Zouerat, complete with bypass! No wonder Moroccan hats are confiscating this map at the border. You can understand them not keeping up with all the asphalting, but the practise of calling a piste a road is hard to fathom. Where do they get this information – QAnon? These are just a few of the glaring errors that jumped out at me. There are loads more in the Anti Atlas, plus areas depicted as forest which are barren mountain hillsides and contour shading that jumps in 300- and then 600-metre stages. That means within one shade the elevation could change by nearly 2000 feet. Not a great map for push biking then.
To be fair the previous edition did appear to be a genuine update with tangible changes but this edition is near identical to its predecessor. And I know the Michelin equivalent follows the same practise of ‘cover updates’ and can be just as flawed, last time I looked. All the others maps for Morocco are even worse. Sadly, this appears to be the state of paper mapping in the early 21st century – the money no longer exists to update maps properly, nor even action users suggestions. Good thing then there is Morocco Overland with Updates & Corrections as well as the Horizons forum taking up the slack for the adventurous traveller. I gave the 2023 map away.
Got a 2019 edition? Save your money then.
* Are Moroccan road number even useful? Unlike in the UK and Europe, in southern Morocco road numbers rarely appear on road signs, be they at junctions or showing distances. First photo is a positive example, below. So knowing – or wondering if – you’re on the R504 now called the RN4 will be near impossible to ascertain on the ground and therefor of little value. Of course a road sign saying ‘Foum Zguid 87 [km]’ will be what you want to know. Infrequent and often weathered mileposts dating from the colonial era may show a road number. Example: the R203 Marrakech – Taroudant road via Tizi n Test, now called the RN7. In most cases in the 2018 shake up, only the prefix changed so the ‘N10’ became the ‘RN10’ and so on, but elsewhere if there was a new number like the old N12 now called the RN17, I am fairly certain no one has since gone around Morocco updating mileposts and road signs.
I was involved as one of the guides on the recce for the Hard Way Home back in October 2022, repeating the course again just before following the actual filmed event in February from Ouarzazate to Marrakech. The first three Grenadier customers picked up their brand new cars from the middle of nowhere in Morocco and drove them home. The 500-km route we mapped out was a spectacular mix of mountain and desert, but as you’ll see, with snow down to 1800 metres, bad weather disrupted the actual launch event. ‘The Grenadier Route’ will be in 4th edition of Morocco Overland, due early 2025. see also: Scott Brady from OJ in the Ineos.
Sahara Overland 