The hook
The Sahara as everyone pictures it: a single wall of orange dune rising 150 metres out of flat stony desert, going soft pink at dawn, with camps in the hollows behind it and a night sky most visitors have never seen the equal of.
01Why it's worth it
Erg Chebbi is a compact sea of sand, roughly 30 km by 7, and its virtue is that the dunes are genuinely enormous and genuinely close to the road, so you reach real desert without a week-long expedition. The standard trip walks or rides camels over the crest in late afternoon, sleeps at a camp among the dunes, and climbs a high dune for sunrise, and the standard trip is good: the silence after dark, the drum music around a fire, and a Milky Way with no light pollution for hundreds of kilometres. It is also thoroughly commercialised, dozens of camps, from basic to luxury, and everyone gets a similar itinerary. The route there is half the value, over the Atlas passes through the Dadès and Todra gorges and the kasbah at Aït Benhaddou, so the drive should be treated as sightseeing rather than transit. Note that some operators pitch "the Sahara" as a day trip from Marrakech; it's roughly nine hours each way, so at minimum give it two nights on the road.
02How to experience it
Take a two- or three-day route from Marrakech or Fes so the gorges and kasbahs count, and sleep at a dune camp rather than a hotel in the village. Choose a camp on reviews rather than price alone, climb a dune for sunrise, and go between October and April — summer here is genuinely dangerous heat. Bring a scarf for wind-blown sand and warm layers for the night.
From the locals
It survives every honest ledger of the country. Even the traveller who found Morocco exhausting, six weeks and "by the end I barely wanted to leave my accommodation", still listed Merzouga among the places that were "all great." Another's summary of what to prioritise is blunt: skip Casablanca, "you only need 3 days in Marrakech," and "definitely go to the desert on a tour… book a tour with camel safaris, they are SO lovely, professional."