What's a good adventure / active itinerary?

For active travellers I throw out the museum circuit and build the trip around getting outdoors and moving. We start near Marrakech but head straight up into the High Atlas to Imlil, the launchpad for the best trekking in North Africa. Depending on fitness and season, that's either a two-day trek through Berber villages and walnut groves with a night in a mountain gîte, or — for the genuinely fit, with proper acclimatisation — a guided ascent of Jebel Toubkal, at 4,167m the highest peak in the country. Either way you eat tagine cooked by your muleteer and sleep under serious stars.

From the mountains we drop east to the gorges, which are an adventure playground. The Todra Gorge has world-class limestone for rock climbing with local guides and bolted routes for all levels, plus dramatic canyon-floor hikes between 300-metre walls. I like to weave in a half-day climb or a longer gorge-to-gorge walk through palmeries here, so you're using your hands and legs rather than sitting in the car. The scenery does half the work of making it feel epic.

Then the desert, but the active version. At Erg Chebbi we trade the gentle sunset stroll for a proper camel trek deeper into the dunes, sandboarding down the big faces of the erg, and an optional dawn run or quad-bike blast across the flats. A night in a tented camp resets you, and the sunrise hike up the tallest nearby dune is a quad-burner that pays off with the best view of the trip. This is the desert earned with effort rather than just admired from a deckchair.

We finish on the Atlantic at Taghazout for surf. The point breaks here suit everyone from first-timers taking a lesson at Crocodile beach to confident surfers chasing Anchor Point, and Imsouane up the coast has that famously long, mellow right-hander. Two or three nights of dawn patrols, yoga to unknot the trekking muscles, and clifftop sunsets is the perfect active wind-down. Across nine or ten days you've trekked, climbed, sandboarded, and surfed — Morocco as one continuous adventure.