Destination
Erg Chebbi is the reason most people come south — a 28 km wall of sand rising to 150 metres, and the last stop on every route we run.
Routes
4 routes go through here.
Merzouga is thirty kilometres from Rissani, where we live, so this is the one destination on the site we can describe from the doorstep rather than from a brochure. Erg Chebbi is not the whole Sahara — it is one erg, a sand sea, and Morocco has others — but it is the one with the height. The dunes reach about 150 metres, which is why the sunrise is worth the alarm: the light crosses the crests before it reaches the ground and the colour changes every two or three minutes for about twenty.
Every itinerary that comes here arrives in the late afternoon, walks or rides in by camel while the heat drops, and sleeps at the foot of the dunes. Dinner is around a fire, the music afterwards is Gnawa if the camp has the players for it, and there is no light pollution for a hundred kilometres in any direction.
Nights are cold from November to February — properly cold, near freezing before dawn. The camps carry heavy blankets and nobody has ever needed to be told twice to take one.
