What's it like to drive the Tizi n'Tichka pass?

You leave Marrakech on a wide, easy road through flat ochre country, lulled, and then the High Atlas rears up across the horizon like a barricade and the climbing begins in earnest. The Tizi n'Tichka is a single ribbon of tarmac stitched up the mountainside in switchback after switchback after switchback, each hairpin doubling you back on yourself, the engine dropping to a grind, your ears popping, the air through the window turning cool and thin as you gain height fast.

It is, honestly, a road that gets your attention. For long stretches there's nothing between the edge of the lane and a very long drop but air — no barrier, no verge — and the valley falls away so far below that the river is a thread and a whole village looks like a scattering of dice. Lumbering trucks and buses take the inside of the bends so you ease past on the outside with the drop right beneath your wheels, and overtaking is a held-breath affair best left entirely to a calm local driver who's done it a thousand times.

But the drama is the reward, bend for bend. Round one corner and a Berber village is glued to the cliff opposite, mudbrick houses the colour of the mountain, women in bright scarves on impossible paths; round the next and the whole range opens up, ridge behind ridge fading blue into the distance. There are pull-ins where boys sell crystals, fossils, and bags of nuts, and a clutch of cafés near the top where you can stand in the cold, brilliant, high-altitude light, look back down at the road you've conquered, and let your heart rate settle.

Crest the pass at 2,260 metres and the second half is its own revelation. As you wind down the southern side the green simply runs out — the rock turns gold and rose, palm-choked gorges open below, the kasbahs begin, and you feel the Sahara start to pull. Allow far more time than the distance suggests; it's a long, slow, stop-everywhere kind of road, not a transfer. But as a drive, as a pure piece of theatre carved over a mountain, the Tizi n'Tichka has few equals anywhere.