Adrar Classic

8am from the hotel. We make the Akjoujt tea stop at 11am — strong, sweet, three rounds — and push on into the Adrar. The dunes at Azoueiga come into view around 3pm and they are bigger than you expect. We hike to the top before sunset and camp below.

The drive to Terjit takes most of the morning. When the gorge appears it feels like a trick — palm trees and running water inside a desert plateau. We swim, rest, and stay at a local guesthouse. This is one of the few places on the trip where you sleep in a bed.

Atar in 46km, Chinguetti in 85km more. We arrive by mid-morning and spend the rest of the day in the old city — a place so historically significant it became one of the seven holy cities of Islam in the medieval period. The manuscript libraries hold thousands of texts that survived here because nothing rots in the Sahara. We sleep with the sand blowing through the alleyways.

128km east through open desert. Ouadane is older and quieter than Chinguetti — a trading hub that connected sub-Saharan Africa to the Maghreb for centuries. The old quarter is UNESCO-listed and almost completely deserted. We walk the collapsed caravanserais, eat with a local family, and camp at the walls. The silence here is a different quality to anything from the first three days.

We turn south and the landscape changes. The plateau on the return is softer, more golden, the light hitting it differently than it did on the way up. Around 300km of driving today, ending in a camp on open ground with nothing in any direction.

250km home. Lunch stop in Atar. Back in the city by 4pm. Six days. Two UNESCO cities. Africa's tallest dunes. A desert oasis.