Is any desert more evocative? Everyone has heard of it and – for me at least – “Sahara” is a word which summons images of camels plodding stately over apricot dunes, green oases thick with palms, Bedouin tents, heat and dust. We set out to see how far we could get into its great emptiness before we ran out of time, bravery or luck. In the end, we stretched all three. But first we had to find it.

We drove east from the Dades and Todra gorges with banks of rock either side of us which eventually veered away, until the landscape levelled out into a stony plain that was dusty, but not entirely dry.

There was an occasional slim river and aquifers which you can spot from the curious mounds created by the access holes people have dug. Every so often we passed stands of date palms, planted in rows. In Taghzoute we saw camels for the first time in Morocco, grazing by the road.

In Melaab we stopped for nus-nus (half coffee half milk) at a cafe in a grand building like something from the old American West.

It’s a reminder that the Sahara is not just a golden band of sand across Northern Africa, it’s got towns and people and roads; cafes and shops, houses and schools.

The desert towns we passed through; Tinghir, Tinejdad, Jorf, were surprisingly substantial with long, wide main streets lined with tiny shops, revealed by metal doors swung open onto the street. The roads were busy, children waved at us and there were more bikes than we’ve seen before – some ridden by women, which was a first. Imperceptibly the fertile land lost some of its fertility and by the time we stopped at a camp ground where we were the only guests, we were undoubtably in a desert.

The next day, we filled our water tank and headed south. The drive was drier and flatter and outside Merzouga a thrilling line of buttery dunes appeared on the horizon.

This was Erg Chebbi (“erg” means dune”) a well known patch of Sahara perhaps 30km long by 10km wide, which has become a playground for off-roaders. Merzouga is the jumping off point for the dunes and we stocked up at a street-side grocery – peppers, aubergines, carrots, fat oranges with leaves attached, hard pears, apples and a pomegranate.

Then ho for the dunes. Except we couldn’t really find a way to get to them initially; our Garmin sending us up back-streets of carved-up concrete-hard mud, behind shops, through palm groves – or out of town the wrong way. A track into the dunes I was aiming for turned out, on closer inspection, to be a walking route. Another looked more likely 20 minutes north of town. So we headed back the way we’d come in, pulling off onto another mud road behind a hotel and then through a hole in a wall to the camel camp at the edge of the dunes.

I stopped to air down the tires and within minutes a guy appeared on a moped offering advice about which camp to stop at, how to get a camel ride and basically all the stuff we absolutely didn’t want. I was going from wheel to wheel letting air out as he followed me and continued his patter, unrolling the vials of sand he’d like to sell us. He got the hint eventually and left. Moments later another moped appeared and the rigmarole started again. In my haste to leave the constant sales pitch behind and get into the dunes, I didn’t quite get the tires flat enough for soft sand… But the sun was heading for the horizon so off we went.

We skirted the big dunes following a track on the Garmin created by someone else in a 4×4, but when the track turned sharply into the deep sand, I realised it would be foolish to follow. It was getting late, the sand was soft and deep and that makes a dicey prospect for a five and a half ton truck. We headed on to a flat space between the dunes, and then spotted somewhere else just a leeeetle further in. The truck slowed and it felt like we may have got bogged in but it was the perfect place to park for the night and it had been an irritating journey so we both kept our “bogged in” thoughts to ourselves. I turned off the engine and the desert silence filled the cab. We had driven from the UK to the Sahara, which felt like something.

The sun was setting so we got some sand between our toes.

All too quickly, the sun shimmered and flashed briefly green behind a horizon fuzzy with dust and the stars slowly swept across the sky. It is magic this place. We left our roof blind open and the starlight was dazzling. Neither of us mentioned our lingering thoughts that Arnie might actually be stuck…