★★★★★ Rated 4.5/5 — 204 Google reviews · 576 reviews · 5.0/5 on Tripadvisor · Written by a licensed Marrakech tour operator, on the road since 2011
The overnight camel trek is the desert’s headline act — and the part travellers are most nervous about booking blind. Having ridden it in every season and every state of fitness, here is the unvarnished account.
The ride in, honestly
Forty-five minutes to an hour at walking pace, single file, a handler leading on foot. The mounting lurch is the only real event — camels stand back-legs-first, everyone tips forward, everyone laughs. After ten minutes your body finds the sway; after twenty you stop gripping and start looking. Sore points next day: inner thighs, mildly. Nobody has ever described it as athletic.
Can everyone do it?
Children ride from about age four (shared saddle or short strings); grandparents ride happily every week of the season. Pregnant travellers, bad backs and the simply unwilling take the 4×4 track to the same camp — no version of the night is lost by skipping the saddle, and mixing modes within one family is completely normal on a private departure.
What the trek adds that the 4×4 cannot
Arrival earned at animal pace: the dunes swallowing the horizon one crest at a time, the camp appearing as a handful of lamps in a bowl of sand. It is the difference between reaching the desert and entering it.
Booking it right
Ours is the standard leg of the 4-day Erg Chebbi circuit (from €600) — private group, named camp, real beds at the end of the ride. Saddle-hour worries, luggage questions, camera advice: the Merzouga FAQ has heard them all.
Everything on this page can be woven into a private itinerary — start from Morocco desert tours, and we shape the rest around you.
Fatima Zahra Ouazzani — Fatima Zahra covers the desert south — Merzouga, Zagora, the Draa Valley and the oasis routes between them. Her writing keeps returning to the people of the region: the families who run the camps, the date harvest in autumn, the way a khettara irrigation channel organises an entire palm grove. She is our reference for travellers who want the Sahara with its context still attached.
