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To escape the maelstrom of Marrakech, Linda Cookson goes on an off-road trip to the desert – and revels in its stony silence

Saturday, 5 April 2008

There's not a speck of sand in sight in the southern Moroccan town of Ouarzazate – no dunes, no tents, no wandering nomads. Yet the trail to the Sahara desert starts here.

The town's name, approximately pronounced "Waz-a-zat", sounds rather more exotic than the reality, which is a fairly unremarkable colonial settlement built as a garrison by the French in the 1920s. It has palm-lned streets, municipal gardens and fountains, and a seemingly endless selection of car-rental outlets. But the name's meaning in Berber dialect – "without noise" – hints enticingly at the otherworldly stillness of vast skies and shifting sands that lies just beyond the town known as The Gateway to the Sahara.

The 290km journey south from Ouarzazate passes through an eerie, biblical landscape of cool oases and sun-baked kasbahs, right down to where the desert sands begin. It feels like a ride in a time machine – a journey into the very heart of silence. Ouarzazate's history as a staging post for travellers long predates the current French fortress. Lying where three rivers converge, it's a natural crossroads linking east with west and north with south. Until coastal shipping came to Morocco in the late-19th century, it was a busy stopping-off point for the caravans that plied the trans-Saharan trade route. Thousands of camels and their owners made the arduous two-month journey across the Sahara to Timbuktu, bearing cargoes of salt, dates, barley and goatskins and returning with the gold, slaves and ivory that would make North Africa wealthy.

The idea of following a trade route into the deep south struck us as wonderfully exotic. With that in mind, we opted not to start our romantic journey into the desert in Ouarzazate itself, but to begin 210km to the north in Marrakech. Unsurprisingly, we chickened out of attempting a 500km camel-ride. Ali Leghlid, our cheerful driver-cum-guide, was more than happy for his trusty four-wheel drive to take the strain for most of the trip.

The Tizi n'Tichka road out of Marrakech, a magnificent feat of engineering built by the Foreign Legion in 1936, leads directly to the deep south. It cuts through the High Atlas mountains by way of a spectacular pass – 2,260m at its highest point – that snakes and twists like a length of grey ribbon that has been wrapped round the red earth of the mountainside. We set off from Marrakech at dawn. Even early in the morning, we discovered, manic Marrakech doesn't do stillness or silence. The muezzin's recorded wail was crackling through loudspeakers outside a mosque. Blacksmiths had lit their fires and were already hammering away. And the narrow streets of the kasbah were crammed with the usual early-morning traffic.

Soon, the cacaphony was behind us. Ahead, the mountains of the High Atlas beckoned, their shapes a rosy glow on the horizon. As we grew closer, they separated into smoky layers of soft greys and pinks. The sun rose in the sky like a silver coin, and we passed through what felt like half-a-dozen different countries in the space of a couple of hours. Agricultural flatlands began to give way to arid mountains, as we climbed high above olive groves, fruit orchards and bamboo fields in to a Martian wilderness of blood-red rocks and tall shadows. The snow that we'd seen on distant peaks started to appear around us. The landscape became increasingly barren.

Pine trees were soon replaced by acacia trees and tamarinds. Colours shifted constantly across a spectrum that ranged from charcoal to crimson. By the time we emerged from the vertiginous spirals of the high-altitude pass to begin the descent towards Ouarzazate, the mountains were devoid of vegetation. The pale stone settlements that clung to their sides were coated in dust.

By now, it felt as though we were already in the midst of the desert. But there were further surprises in store. The journey south from Ouarzazate, reckoned to be one of the most beautiful in Morocco, led back in to bewildering lushness – 125km of thick, green, palm groves in the valley of the River Draa – before we made our final approach to the sands of the desert.

The Draa is technically the longest river in Morocco, rising in the mountains just outside of Ouarzazate and notionally flowing some 1,100km along the edge of the Sahara to reach the Atlantic Ocean near Tan Tan. In 1989, after a freak flood, it ran its full course for the first time in living memory. For centuries, it has been dry for the final three-quarters of its journey. After carving a rocky channel between the Anti Atlas mountains to the west and the volcanic peaks of the Jbel Sarhro to the east, it flows through tracts of fertile valley that seem endless. But then, abruptly, its waters peter out, and the bed becomes an empty strip of dry rocks. At the oasis town of M'hamid it simply vanishes into the sands.

The Draa valley is known as the Valley of the Thousand Kasbahs, and the route from the start of the valley, in the small town of Agdz (70km south of Ouarzazate), to the fringes of the desert itself is packed with these evocative fortified settlements, which are built up from the earth around oases. Often, they're barely visible from the road, hidden as they are among the palm groves. Fashioned from clay pressed together with pebbles and straw – a technique known as pisé – and with roofs made of reed matting inserted into wooden frames, they rise as though from the land itself.

Newer buildings are red in colour, their thick walls clearly defined. But what's especially fascinating is how, as the buildings age, they simply collapse back in to the land.

Ali, our guide, was born in southern Morocco and proved an invaluable source of information. There are heart-breaking pockets of poverty in the region, we discovered. The upper reaches of the Draa valley are provided for by the El Mansour Eddahbi dam, built near Ourzazate in 1971 in order to distribute water more evenly among the 50 or so settlements in that area. Fruit trees, vegetables and crops all flourish, alongside the date palms for which the area is celebrated. But the impact of the dam has been devastating to residents in the lower reaches of the valley, who are now deprived of running water and their livelihoods as farmers.

Ali drove us off-piste at several points so that we could see the contrast for ourselves. First, we visited Tamnougalt, a prosperous settlement 6km south of Agdz. The air smelt of honey. Almond blossom drifted like snowflakes, as women tended the bean-fields by the river bed. A crowd of young boys were busily packing orange cardboard boxes of dates in to crates, for selling at the roadside. At the other end of our journey, nearer the Sahara, it was a different story. In the Berber settlement of Ait Atta and the Jewish settlement of Beni Sbih, withered date palms stood like totems in the stony ground. A date palm can yield an income of 150 dirhams (£10) a year, Ali explained. Deprived of that income and in no position to raise the 10,000 dirhams (£650) needed to buy a camel, villagers scratch an existence as best they can, keeping chickens and goats among the rubble and sieving the earth for saleable fossils or brightly coloured stones.

As every schoolchild probably knows (although I didn't), the Sahara is mostly made out of stone. Less than 30 per cent of its total area is covered in sand. But the pot of gold – or bucket of sand – at our journey's end was to be the romance of a dromedary ride across the dunes at sunset. And the great moment had finally arrived.

Hassan, our chamelier, was waiting for us at the palmery-village of Oualad Driss, where a thrilling drift of sand across the surface of the road marked the end of the stony sub-Saharan wastelands known as hammada and the start of the desert itself. And off we set, into the silence. It was a journey like no other we'd ever made. For two magical hours there wasn't another soul in sight, just rolling folds of fine beige sand dotted with occasional tamarisk trees. Theirs were the only shadows cast, apart from our own. The only sound was the gentle, rhythmic plodding of the camels' hooves. All above and around us – the sky feels like a dome in the desert – the day sky that began as a haze of brilliant blue slipped in to the colours of night. Sands rose into crescent-shaped dunes as the light began to fail. And finally, ahead on the horizon, we saw the light of a fire marking the camp where we would spend our night under the stars.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

Getting there: Fly from Gatwick to Marrakech on easyJet (0905 821 0905; www.easyJet.com) and Atlas Blue (020-7307 5803; www.atlas-blue.com), or from Heathrow on Royal Air Maroc (020-7307 5800; www.royalairmaroc.com).

Linda Cookson travelled with Inntravel (01653 617906; www.inntravel.co.uk) which offers a one-week City & Sahara Experience starting at £875 per person in March and April. It includes hotels and a night in a camp with breakfast, some meals, as well as the services of a driver, and the camel ride. International flights not included. You can buy an "offset" through Abta's Reduce my Footprint initiative (020-7637 2444; www.reducemyfootprint.travel).

More information: Moroccan National Tourist Office: 020-7437 0073; or got to www.visitmorocco.com