OPINION: A great drive is all in the road

A family holiday in Morocco presented the opportunity to test this theory with my favourite activity — a road trip that involves as few straight roads as possible. We had a car custom-made for the job of deciding whether it's roads, not cars, that make driving fun: a very-well-used Dacia Duster.

In fairness, the Duster is a four-wheeled advert for just how far basic vehicles have come. The second-generation SUV may have represented the entry point to the Duster line-up, but it boasted luxuries like air-conditioning, cruise control, four electric windows and a USB port that could charge your phone and play music (just not at the same time). The Duster would, as we soon found out, have other attributes useful for crossing Moroccan mountain passes.

Making our way through the Atlas Mountain range was the plan. It stretches more than 1,500 miles across Northwest Africa through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and peaks at more than 4,000m. It also has some truly windy roads.

Motorways are excellent if you want to get from A to B as quickly as possible, but as a way to get a sense of the country you're driving through, they're useless. You're moving too quickly to take in your surroundings, and often away from built-up areas there isn't much to see.

This is particularly true in Northwest Morocco, where away from the cities and the mountains, you'll find featureless plains as far as the eyes can see. Off the motorway, though, it is an entirely different story.

Stick to the N roads, Morocco's Routes Nationales highways (more like a British B road), and you can take in the sun-scorched architecture and luscious green gardens that sprout out from the sand like an oasis. 

From Taghazout Bay we headed out to find ourselves at the start of the Tizi-n-Test mountain pass. Now, while a mountain pass in Italy and Switzerland is exciting because of its breathtaking views and beautiful roads, Moroccan mountain passes serve up different types of excitement, the anticipation of clear and present danger as you climb into mountains and the thrill of surviving it.

The Tizi-n-Test is not a driving road. In fact, in some stretches, there is barely a road at all. In Morocco, rockfall signs tend to be semi-obscured by the piles of boulders that jut out into the middle of the road after the last time the mountain gave way. You have mere feet to play with as you squeeze between the rock pile on one side and the shear drop on the other. 

When we crossed it the Tizi-n-Test was in the midst of a renovation, so at points the Tarmac defaulted to loose sand with diversion signs, creating our own gravel rally stage. 

Our dilapidated Duster hire car proved to be the perfect tool for the job: scruffy enough to camouflage fresh stone chips, with high-riding suspension ideal for absorbing the worst Morocco could throw at it and a torquey diesel engine perfect for hauling it up steep gradients. Even its lack of four-wheel drive proved to be a good thing, as the front-driven wheels hauled us around the country's dust-covered bends.

Our route may have turned a three-hour drive into an eight-hour epic, but it was also one of the most memorable drives of my life and one that was completed at an average speed of less than 25mph. A friendly reminder that fast cars are fun, but they’re nothing without a great road.

Main image courtesy of Getty Images.