Two days is the minimum the Sahara can honestly be done in from the coast. About 426 km each way in a straight line and more by road, so a day trip would be twelve hours in a car for an hour in the dunes. Two days makes the drive buy something: Kairouan, Tozeur, the salt lake, Douz and Matmata.
Down on day one with Kairouan breaking the journey, a night in the south, and back on day two through the Chott and Matmata. Every stop is on the line of the road rather than a detour, which is what makes two days work at all.
Mahdia
The amphitheatre is the third largest that survives and the most complete thing the Romans left in Africa — room for something like thirty-five thousand people in a town that now has far fewer. What makes it worth the stop rather than the photograph is that you can go down into the underground passages where animals and fighters were held and come up into the arena the way they did. It stands directly in the town, so it arrives without warning above the rooftops.
Gabès
The houses are dug down into the ground rather than built on it — a central pit for a courtyard, rooms cut horizontally into its walls, cool in summer and warm in winter. Some are still lived in. Sidi Driss, now a hotel, was the Lars homestead in the first Star Wars film and has kept the set dressing. The landscape above ground is bare and lunar, which is presumably what recommended it.
Kébili
Where the tarmac ends and the Grand Erg Oriental begins, which is why it is called the gate of the desert. The dunes start at the edge of town, so you are on sand within minutes rather than after an hour of driving. Camels go out from here in the late afternoon, when the light is worth having and the heat has gone. The Thursday market is a real regional market rather than a tourist one.
Tozeur
A salt lake the size of a small country, crossed on a causeway built straight across the middle. In summer it is dry and blinding white; after rain it holds a film of water and mirrors the sky, and the far shore appears to float. The colours shift with the mineral content — pinks and rust in patches that look artificial in photographs and are not. Stop, get out, walk on the crust a little way. It is the strangest half hour on any southern circuit.
Tozeur
An oasis town whose old quarter is built from projecting brickwork — the bricks are laid to stand proud of the wall in geometric patterns, so the facades read like textile. The palm grove behind the town is fed by springs and is worked, not decorative; a calèche ride through it is the usual way to see the scale. Tozeur is the base for the mountain oases and the film sets, and the last real town before the salt lake.
Tozeur
A mountain oasis at the foot of a bare ridge, where a spring runs out of a narrow gorge and falls into palms below. The old village was abandoned after floods in 1969 and left standing, so you walk up through empty stone houses to the water. First of the three mountain oases and the easiest to reach; the walk to the falls takes twenty minutes.
Tozeur
The largest of the mountain oases, with the abandoned old town on one side of the wadi and the new one on the other. The waterfall runs year-round, which in this landscape is startling, and the canyon below it is deep enough to change the temperature. Between Chebika and Mides on the piste along the Algerian border.
Tozeur
A gorge with sheer walls dropping straight from the village edge, right on the Algerian frontier. The old village sits on the lip of it and is largely empty; you walk to the rim and the ground simply stops. It has been filmed more than once, and the light in the late afternoon is what people come back for.
Kairouan
The fourth holy city of Islam and the oldest Muslim city in North Africa. The Great Mosque is a plain fortress from outside and a forest of columns within, most of them taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings — you can still read the reuse. Non-Muslim visitors can enter the courtyard, not the prayer hall. The Aghlabid basins on the edge of town are ninth-century reservoirs, open and circular, still holding water. Dress covered here; it is a working religious city, not a monument.
The mountain oases, the ksour, and a night under the sky. If the camp is what you want, the two-day camp version is the same route with the hotel swapped for a desert camp.
2 days / 1 night · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
It is enough to stand in the dunes at Douz, cross the Chott and see Tozeur, with Kairouan and Matmata on the way. It is not enough for the canyons or the ksour.
A hotel in Tozeur or Douz. If you would rather sleep in the desert, take the camp version of this tour — same route, different night.
It is the strangest half hour of the trip. A causeway straight across a salt lake the size of a small country, white in summer and mirror-like after rain.
October to April. Between May and September the deep south regularly passes 45°C and the salt lake is dry and colourless.
Distances are straight-line, measured between the coordinates on our map of the sites; road distances are longer. Prices are per vehicle and come from the same database the 34 tours and 1,392 transfer fares.
