What is the Atlas mountains crossing, the Tizi n'Tichka, like?

The Tizi n'Tichka is the road every desert-bound traveller crosses, and it is an experience in its own right rather than just a connection. It links Marrakech with Ouarzazate, climbing from the warm Haouz plain up over the spine of the High Atlas to a pass at 2,260 metres before dropping into the pre-Saharan south. The whole crossing is about 200 kilometres and takes around four hours — recently widened and resurfaced, so far smoother than the white-knuckle road of a few years ago, though still a serious mountain route.

The drive begins gently, through red-earth villages and olive groves, then the switchbacks start in earnest. The road coils up the mountainside in tight hairpins, each bend opening a wider view back over the valleys, with Berber hamlets of flat-roofed earthen houses clinging to slopes that look almost vertical. In late autumn and winter the high ground carries snow, and the contrast of white peaks against ochre villages is something guests photograph endlessly.

I always build in stops. There are roadside argan cooperatives and viewpoints, and just below the pass a cluster of cafes where mint tea and a tagine taste extraordinary at altitude. A short detour off the main road leads to Telouet, a crumbling, atmospheric kasbah of the Glaoui pasha with painted ceilings still intact — well worth an hour for anyone not in a hurry. The descent on the southern side is gentler, the land drying out before your eyes.

Crossing the Tizi n'Tichka is the moment a Morocco trip tips from city into wilderness. You leave Marrakech in one world and arrive in Ouarzazate, the film-set gateway to the kasbahs and the Sahara, in quite another. My advice is simple: do not treat it as a transfer to be endured. Give it the morning, stop often, and let the great mountain crossing be one of the highlights of the journey rather than a hurdle on the way to the dunes.