In a world where weekend city breaks have become ten-a-penny, a whole new breed of mini-adventures have sprung up to satisfy our travel-hungry, time-starved nation. So it was to my delight that I stumbled across a Saharan Escape adventure where I could follow in the footsteps of T E Lawrence over a long weekend. After a stopover at Casablanca and a further 40-minute flight, I land at Ouarzazate, which appears to be in the middle of nowhere and the front line of the desert. The lights of the airport bus pick out the tiny terminal building in front of which are silhouetted palm trees and groups of soldiers.Amid ancient white Mercedes are three waiting Land Rover Defenders, which will carry our mixed group of 12 explorers across some 500 miles of desert.

We are met by Mustapha our guide, who is dressed in traditional costume of djebella and babouches, pointy turned-up-toe slippers. After a short drive through this dusty frotier town we reach Hotel La Vall? at nearly midnight. This former French administrative centre is divided by a wide dried-up riverbed. One side has become more European as a result of the film studio complex on the outskirts of town, which has played host to movies such as Gladiator, The Sheltering Sky, Star Wars and The Mummy.We are staying in the African side, which when morning breaks I see is run-down and filled with half-baked buildings. Before turning in for the night I go out by the pool and look up at a dark sky, heavy with bright constellations, and wonder what the firmament will look like in the Sahara without light pollution.At just after six, the alarm of barking dogs echoes around town and I wake with a start The scene from the hotel terrace is magnificent. The rising sun casts pastel shades across a Hollywood skyline.

The snow-capped Atlas mountains soar in the distance and the foreground is punctuated with minarets, desert fortresses and oases of palm trees, in a scene straight from Lawrence of Arabia, which was filmed here.Mustapha gives us a basic briefing. All our group have been on this type of trip before and I begin to worry about sleeping in a tent – which I have done only once, when I was 20, and hated it – let alone have no running water to wash with for three days and no loo. And it was at this point that Mustapha chose to hand out our toiletry essentials: a plastic bag, one roll of toilet paper and a box of matches. You burn the paper, leaving what biodegradable waste you have produced behind you.

So for a man who generally likes his comforts five-star and going to places where Bulgari toiletries are standard, this was a testing moment.Leaving Ouarzazate behind us we head out on one of the great southern oasis roads towards Zagora, following an old caravan route along which gold, silver, salt and slaves were once plied. The desert here is a rocky and barren lunarscape and the potholed single-track tarmac road picks its way across dried up riverbeds and ribbons out ahead of us towards the High Atlas. Occasionally, people appear from nowhere, carrying vast square bales of scrub on their backs, doubled over under the weight. As we drive over the Djebel hills the Anti-Atlas mountains tower in the distance through layers of pink mist.We go off-road on a bumpy piste (an unsurfaced road) towards the ksar (village) of Tamnougalt. Driving through a dense oasis of palm groves and irrigated plots of alfalfa, almond trees, barley and henna shrubs, we pass armies of women who wash colourful clothes in a stream and lay them out to dry on bushes. A young couple draws water from the communal well and what at first appears to be a biblical scene is betrayed by the satellite dishes sticking out from the ancient dwellings.The central four-gated kasbah, which dates from the early 1500s, is a crumbling adobe affair. We are guided through its labyrinth of dark tunnels by a beautiful young Berber.