Camel Trekking in the Sahara: What It Is Actually Like (2026)

Two different things share one name

Search "Morocco camel trek" and you will get two products described in nearly

identical language.

The first is a sunset ride: an hour, maybe ninety minutes, from a car park

at the edge of the dunes to a fixed camp. You sit on a saddled dromedary in a

line of ten, a handler leads, and you arrive in time for dinner and drumming.

It is genuinely lovely, and it is what most people mean by a camel trek. It is

included in our 3-day Sahara tour.

The second is a caravan trek, and it barely resembles the first. The camels

carry the camp — tents, water, food, cooking kit. You walk. Days are five to

seven hours on foot, you sleep wherever the caravan stops, and there is no road

and no fixed camp for the duration.

Both are worth doing. Booking one expecting the other is the mistake, and the

booking pages rarely make the difference obvious.

What the walking actually involves

Our 8-day Chegaga trek covers roughly

83 km on foot across five trekking days — a little under 17 km a day. The

route runs Draa Valley → the Hamada du Draa → over the Abbes pass into **Erg

Chegaga** → the Bougarne dunes → Oued Naam → out at M'hamid.

Seventeen kilometres sounds light. In sand, at desert pace, it is a working

day. The ground is flat, there is no altitude and nothing technical, so the

difficulty is repetition rather than any one hard section — six consecutive

days of the same effort, with the sun and the surface doing the wearing.

The pace is set by the caravan, not by you, and it is slower than you would

walk alone. That is deliberate: the camels set a rhythm the whole group can

hold for a week.

Do you ride at all?

Some, usually briefly, and less than you are imagining.

The camels are load animals on this kind of trip. Their work is carrying the

camp; a rider is extra weight on an animal already carrying a week of water and

equipment. In practice people ride a little — crossing a stretch of open

hamada, or when a blister needs an hour off — and walk the rest.

This is not a limitation we apologise for. **It is the ethical structure of the

trip**, and it is worth explaining why.

The welfare question

This deserves a straight answer rather than a paragraph of reassurance.

Morocco has no national animal welfare law. PETA's investigations at

Moroccan tourist ride sites documented camels beaten, tethered on ropes a few

feet long without shade in extreme heat, and sold for slaughter once they stop

being profitable — often after around five years of ride work. That reporting

is real and it is about a real part of this industry.

It does not describe every operation, and the difference is not a matter of

branding. It is structural, and you can check it with direct questions:

• Who owns the camels? Animals owned by the nomad families who work them

are cared for differently from animals owned by a ride concession that rents

them out by the hour.

• Do the camels carry people or equipment? Pack work spread across a

caravan is a fundamentally lighter load than continuous rider rotation.

• How many camels per traveller? More animals means less weight each.
• What happens between departures? Rest and natural grazing, or tethered at

a ride site waiting for the next group.

• What happens when a camel is too old to work? The honest answer in a good

operation is retirement at sixteen to eighteen, not the meat market.

Ask those five questions of any operator, ours included. The ones doing it

properly answer immediately and specifically, because the answers are simply

how they already work. Vagueness is the signal.

Our caravan camels belong to the M'hamid families who walk them, they carry

equipment rather than passengers, and they rest between departures. That is

also precisely why you walk.

What it is like to sleep out there

There is no fixed camp on this route. The bivouac moves with you and is pitched

where the day ends.

The practical consequences: no plumbing, no generator, no wifi, and — past the

Chegaga dunes — no artificial light within about 50 km. The night sky is the

part people describe afterwards, and it is a straightforward function of that

distance from anything electrical.

Desert nights are cold. Winter lows around Chegaga sit close to freezing,

and the temperature swing between afternoon and 3 am is the thing most first-

timers underestimate. A real sleeping bag matters more than any other item you

pack — see what to pack for a desert tour.

When to go

October to April. Outside that window the midday heat in the Draa makes a

walking caravan unsafe rather than merely unpleasant, and reputable operators

stop running them.

Within it:

• October–November: warm days, mild nights. The easiest introduction.
• December–February: clear, cold, excellent walking. Bring the sleeping bag.
• March–April: warming, longer days, and the last comfortable window before

the season closes.

Chegaga or Chebbi?

Caravan treks work at Erg Chegaga in a way they do not at Erg Chebbi, and the

reason is access. Chebbi is reached by a sealed road from Merzouga, which is

what makes the fixed camps and short rides there possible. Chegaga is 50-odd km

from the nearest tarmac, which rules out the day-trip model and leaves the

caravan as the honest way in.

That is the whole trade-off: Chebbi is easier to reach and busier; Chegaga

takes days and is empty. We compare them in detail in

Erg Chebbi vs Erg Chegaga.

Who this suits

A caravan trek is right for you if you want a walking route with a desert as

the terrain, you are comfortable being genuinely off-grid for the better part

of a week, and the idea of no shower for six days reads as part of the appeal

rather than a cost.

It is the wrong trip if what you actually want is dunes at sunset, a good

dinner and a bed. That trip exists, we run it, and it is not a lesser

experience — it is a different one. Book the one you want.

👉 See the 8-day Chegaga camel trek — 83 km on foot through the Draa and Erg Chegaga, moving bivouac, camels owned and walked by the M'hamid families who work them.