Welcome to Morocco! Today you arrive in Marrakech and meet your guides at Menara Airport. After collecting baggage and introductions, enjoy a sumptuous meal and some rest.

After breakfast, depart from Marrakech and make your way through the Moroccan south. The road beneath you turns to red clay as you reach Telouet, a rustic town that was once a principal stop on the main caravan route to Mali. Here, visit the crumbling Kasbah that was once the palatial residence of the powerful warlord, the Pasha Glaoui. After a meal in Telouet, head for Ourzazate, the most prominent crossroads in southern Morocco. Here, visit the Taourirt Kasbah and several local shops before spending the night.

Depart from Ouarzazate to Morocco’s Valley of the Roses. True to its name, nearly all of the roses used in Morocco for health, beauty, and culinary purposes are grown and produced here. If you’re fortunate enough to travel here during the growing season, your senses of sight and smell will delight from field after field of growing roses. After some demonstrations on the production and uses of these fragrant plants, journey on through the Dades Valley in the late afternoon. By this time in the day, it is cool enough to enjoy a short hike as you take in the majestic beauty of the sun-baked landscape before turning in for the night.

After breakfast, depart from the Dades and head to Imilchil, which hosts the ‘Marriage Moussem’ every year in September. In this festival, the southern tribes gather together, and unmarried women choose their prospective husbands, to whom they will be engaged for one year. Even if you don’t visit during the festival, there is still much to see and experience, including the two lakes that shimmer like jewels in the earthen crown of the adobe soil, Lake Issli and Lake Tislet.

Leave Imilchil this morning and travel on to Tamtouchte, a charming Berber village, to stop for rest and refreshment before making your way through the Todra Gorge. Created by untold amounts of water rushing their way through for thousands of years, the steep cliffs of the Todra Gorge rise over 1,000 feet above you as you make your way through the narrow pass at its base. Travel on to Erfoud, the picturesque town that acts as a gateway for the desert, and stop here for provisions for your excursion into the desert. Here, trade modern transportation for one that has stood the test of time: camel. After our camel trek, you may journey back to a comfortable riad to spend the night, or you may choose to continue your Saharan adventure with a meal cooked over a campfire, singing and drumming into the night before falling asleep in a Bedouin tent under a sky of stars.

Awake in the morning, have breakfast, and head out in 4x4 vehicles to journey to Zagora. Sometimes there are roads, sometimes there are not, but you'll travel on, regardless, just as the people of this area have for hundreds of years. Stop for lunch on the way, and arrive in Zagora for the evening. Here, rejoin modern civilization, and spend an evening relaxing from your previous days’ adventure, enjoying a sumptuous evening meal, a dip in the swimming pool, or even a little souvenir shopping.

In the morning, head north from Zagora to Ait ben Haddou, the massive fortification that still stands from the 11th Century, when it was constructed by the Almoravids. Built of pisé, with its crenellated towers rising above the arid landscape like sentinels keeping watch over the desert, it is little wonder that this structure has been used as a backdrop in numerous Hollywood films, including Lawrence of Arabia and Kingdom of Heaven. Explore the ksar and the surrounding areas at your leisure before turning in for the night.

Set out today to the picturesque Ourika Valley, a vast expanse of green that is a welcome sight amongst so much arid scrubland. Stop at various places throughout this area, dotted with orchards and fields, for rest and refreshment, before arriving at Marrakech. Enjoy your dinner that night in the town’s main square, Djmaa el Fna, where freshly prepared food is cooked up right in front of your eyes. Your entertainment for the evening is a whole host of magicians, acrobats, story tellers, snake charmers, musicians, and dancers, who congregate in the square every night of the year.

Today, you must make the hard decision of exploring Morocco’s Pearl of the South, Marrakech, at your leisure, or partaking of a day trip to the Cascades d’Ouzoud, only a few hours north. In Marrakech, you have the chance to visit numerous historical sights, like the Saadian tombs or the Ben Youssef Mederssa, and calming city oases such as the Jardins Majorelle, or the Menara Gardens. The Cascades offer a series of waterfalls 1,000 feet high, with opportunities to boat down the river, or to picnic in the surrounding olive groves, where you may be joined by wandering groups of curious macaque monkeys. Decisions, decisions!

Your adventure draws to a close! Today you head back to the airport to check-in for your flight home.