Alice Hunter ­Morrison gets her just desert with epic trip through Sahara

Adventurer and presenter of BBC2’s Morocco to Timbuktu series, Alice Hunter ­Morrison, has just ­completed an epic 2000km exploratory trek across the world’s biggest hot desert – the Sahara.

Alice Hunter Morrison on her desert journey

Edinburgh-born Morrison began her expedition on 26 November at Oued Chbika on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and ended it on February 12 at Guergerat on the Mauritanian border. The aim of the expedition was to explore the effects of climate change on the region and particularly how the long-term drought and increasing desertification is affecting the nomadic people who live there. Desertification is claiming up to 16 per cent of arable land every year and the Sahara has grown by 10 per cent.

No stranger to epic adventures, Morrison was the first woman to walk the length of the River Draa in Morocco in 2019, discovering a lost city and tombs en route. She used re-enlisted members of her Draa Expedition team for her latest adventure including three local guides – Brahim Ahalfi, Lhou, Addi Bin Youssef, and six camels, Hunter, Hamish, Hector, Callum, Alasdair and Sausage.

“It’s been tough,” said Morrison, “Endless sandstorms, the constant struggle to find water, the sheer size and monotony of the landscape and the lack of life all made it a psychological battle to keep strong and ­positive and keep on walking – and then there were the encounters with snakes to contend with!”

The team were only able to survive with the help of the desert’s nomadic people, the Sahrawis, who gave them and their camels water as sources were often as far as 200km apart.

The Sahrawis haven’t experienced a good rainfall since 2014 and the vegetation that the camel herds graze on is disappearing at a worrying rate. Some nomads have adapted by using giant plastic storage bags for water which they ship in by lorry, but many are moving out.

Morrison said: “In the UK it feels like we have too much water, with floods destroying land and homes – in this part of the world climate change is drying out the land.

“Although the Sahara has been a desert for thousands of years it has been able to sustain life until now. By walking these miles myself, I have seen first-hand the life that remains and the life that has vanished.

“From where the acacia trees are, to where hyenas can still be found, where there are plentiful hares and desert foxes to capture them, and also where the coruscating dryness means that there is no real life at all.”

It may have been tough, but Morrison said the expedition was also full of excitement and discovery. The team found evidence of Stone Age peoples and ancient settlements and there were also more hazardous unearthings – including an unexploded bomb next to the team’s camp.