Buggy Raid: M’Hamid to Erg Chegaga

The road ends, and then you start

M’Hamid El Ghizlane is where the tarmac in southern Morocco stops. Past the last building there is a sand track, and sixty kilometres later there is the camp. Almost everyone covers that ground in the back of a 4x4, looking out of a window.

This is the version where you drive it yourself.

The buggies are two-seat side-by-side machines with roll cages and harnesses, not quads. You do not need any previous experience. You need a driving licence and a morning.

The ride

You are met at M’Hamid, fitted for helmet, goggles and gloves, and taken through the briefing and a practice loop on open sand before anything else happens. Nobody sets off into the erg without having felt what the machine does when the surface changes.

Then sixty kilometres, roughly three hours with stops. The first stretch is flat hamada, fast and loud, where you learn the buggy. The ground softens into the Lehoudi dunes. The last section is the erg proper, where the guide picks the line and you follow it.

A guide rides at the front and a mechanic rides at the back. Nobody is ever alone between them. A 4x4 runs the same route carrying water, spares, tools and a medical kit, and it carries your luggage, which will be in your tent before you reach it.

Six buggies is our maximum. Beyond that the group strings out, the last riders eat the dust of the first, and the thing stops being a ride and becomes a convoy.

Lunch is laid out on rugs in the shade of a dune. There is a table, there is cold water and there are proper plates. It is not a packed sandwich in a cool box.

Then three nights at the camp

You arrive in the late afternoon with sand in your teeth and a hot shower waiting in your own bathroom.

For the three nights that follow, you share the camp with only a few other guests at most. Eight tents, each with its own bathroom. If your group would rather have the camp to itself, it can take the whole camp, and then it is yours alone.

The nights. A telescope comes out after dinner, with an astronomer who follows whatever you are curious about rather than a script. Erg Chegaga carries a Bortle Class 1 sky, the darkest classification there is, and the Milky Way here is a banded object with visible depth rather than a smear. Later there is a fire, and usually Berber musicians around it.

The days. Bread baked directly in the sand, which you will watch being buried and dug out again. Sandboarding on the steep faces, which is more tiring and more fun than it sounds. A walk with nomad guides who navigate by dune shape and wind rather than by GPS. And a camel ride timed so that you are on the crest when the sun goes.

None of it is compulsory. Several guests each season do nothing at all on the second day, and they are not wrong.

Why it is quoted rather than priced

Buggy numbers, riders per machine, the season, and whether you want the return leg ridden as well as the outbound all move the figure. We quote the whole thing in writing, in one document, before anything is paid.

Tell us your dates and how many of you there are.