Cedar plateau down to the Ziz: reserve a ten night descent through the Middle Atlas

Cedar plateau above a small upland town

The first half sits on a limestone plateau at around sixteen hundred metres, where the Atlas cedar still stands as old growth, some trunks four or five metres round and several centuries old. There are shallow lakes in the hollows, a few of which dry to mud by August, and a small upland town built in the 1930s with pitched roofs and dormers because it snows here, which it does from December into March and holds in shaded ground into April. Barbary macaques live in the roadside groves and are often about; they are wild animals, they are fed far too much from passing cars, and no day is built on the assumption that you will see one. Below the plateau edge the ground steps down through juniper and stone toward the pass.

How the two halves join

The move onto the plateau is marked 1: under two hours of road from the nearest large city, gaining about a thousand metres on the way. The move down to the river is marked 3, a full day, and it is a real day rather than a transfer. You cross a pass at over two thousand metres, come off it into high steppe, then pick up the river and follow it into the first gorge. Two stops on the way are the point of the day and not a leg stretch: an apple growing valley where the road drops out of the cold, and the rim above the first big bend. You arrive in the dark in November and in daylight in May. Luggage travels in the same vehicle; nothing is forwarded separately on this line.

One half taken on its own

Each half stands alone. The cedar plateau is five nights, from $1,180 per person. The river and the gorges down to the town at the far end are five nights, from $1,340 per person. This office does not rank them and will not answer the question of which to pick with an opinion. What it can give you is the difference in kind. The plateau half is cool, green, wooded and short on driving, and it is the half that works with small children. The river half is hot from June onward, longer in the vehicle, and it holds the walled villages, the palm strip and the gorge walls. Taken one after the other they read as a single descent, which is why they are sold as a chain as well as apart.

Building the figure from two parts

From $1,180 per person and from $1,340 per person add to from $2,520 per person. That is the whole line figure, arrived at by addition and nothing else: no reduction for taking both halves, no premium for the chain, and no rounding in either direction. Figures are per person in US dollars, two sharing a double room. Inside: ten nights, three of them in a family run house in a walled village, breakfast daily, all ground moves after you arrive in the country, the full day crossing, and a local walking guide on four days. Outside: getting to Morocco, which you book yourself and which this office does not arrange; lunches and dinners; the single room difference, quoted by the operator; and anything you would insure, which this office neither sells nor discusses.