Morocco

Morocco is really four places, and the distance between them is the thing nobody mentions. Marrakesh is the one people picture: the Jemaa el Fna filling up at dusk, the souks behind it, the Koutoubia minaret you navigate the whole city by, and the Majorelle garden when you want an hour of quiet. Fes is older and harder to read, a walled medina you do not drive into because you cannot, with the tanneries and the Qarawiyyin somewhere in the middle of it. South and east of both, the High Atlas goes up, and the road over the Tizi n'Tichka pass is the part of the trip people talk about afterwards, along with the earth-coloured kasbah at Ait Benhaddou below it. Keep going and the ground turns to stone and then to dune, at Merzouga or at Zagora depending which way you came in. On the Atlantic there is Essaouira, low and white and blue and windy, and much the calmest thing on this list.

For a Pakistani group it is one of the easier countries in the world to be in. It is Muslim, the food is halal without anyone having to ask, there is a mosque within earshot of wherever you are standing, and Friday will feel familiar. Worth knowing in advance: non-Muslims are generally not admitted to working mosques there, which catches out mixed groups. The languages are Darija, Arabic and French, so written Arabic gets you further than you expect, and English is common in the tourist trade and thin outside it.

Two practical things before you decide what you want out of it. The first is that Morocco is big and the good parts are a long way apart, so any real Morocco trip is partly a driving trip. Marrakesh to the desert is most of a day on the road each way, over a mountain pass. It is worth doing and it is not a side trip. The second is that the season matters more here than in most places we sell. Inland in high summer, Marrakesh and the sand in particular, the heat is punishing. Spring and autumn are the comfortable windows, the coast stays mild most of the year, and the desert is cold at night whenever you go.

The group trip covers Tangier, Rabat and Casablanca, the Atlantic side of the country. Read the price carefully, because it is the one exception on this site: every other tour we sell includes the return international flight, and this one does not. The package is the ground arrangements, the visa, the hotels, the meals, the transport and the guided days. The flight is quoted on top, and it depends on which Pakistani city you fly from. Ask us and we put the flight figure in writing beside the package figure before you pay anything. There is no day by day plan published here yet, because the written itinerary has not reached us, and we would rather print nothing than a route we then quietly change.