EMPath2A route south is mostly a line you have already drawn. These are six times we rubbed the line out, lost a day or more, and never once regretted it.
01Chefchaouen, the Blue City
A wrong turn inside the medina put us on a downhill steep enough that Max stopped halfway and needed Eddy to come back for her. She rode it down anyway, by her own description, kicking and screaming the whole way. That is the honest version of arriving in Chefchaouen, not the postcard one.
We came back the next day on foot, on a quiet Tuesday rather than a crowded weekend, and walked the blue lanes properly. Eddy kept comparing the colour to Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia. We stayed three nights, which is longer than the medina alone needs, but it made a good base for what's next on this list.
02The gorge above Chefchaouen
Forty-five minutes out of Chefchaouen by bike, we learned in the car park that the main waterfall we'd come for, the one on all the postcards, was dry. It was already past three in the afternoon and hot enough that the full walk to all three advertised falls, something like twelve kilometres round trip, was not realistic.
So we shortened it: the smaller fall, then on to the Bridge of God, where the path narrows and follows the water closely. The rock walls close in, the air goes cool, and the confinement makes it feel far more dramatic than the dry main fall we'd skipped.
03The escarpment above Lubango
Tundavala Gap is twenty-one kilometres from Lubango, free to enter, with its own car park, and busy enough with visitors that we covered our bikes and gear before walking out to the rim so they'd look uninteresting to anyone passing.
The rim sits above 2,200 metres. The plain below it drops away by roughly 1,200 metres more. There is no barrier and not much warning before the ground simply stops, and the view from the edge is the reason to come.
04The canyon we had to ourselves
This one came free with a guided Sossusvlei tour: after an afternoon on the dunes, our guide walked us down into Sesriem Canyon and then let us explore it alone while he kept an eye on the baboons that live around its edges.
It took about twenty minutes to walk through, start to end, and for the whole twenty minutes we had it entirely to ourselves. Short is not the same as small; it is one of the few places on this list you can properly finish in a single visit.
05The dead trees on the clay pan
Deadvlei is a white clay pan near the more famous dunes at Sossusvlei, and the camelthorn trees standing dead on it are believed to have died somewhere around six to seven hundred years ago. They haven't decomposed, because the pan is too dry for that; they've just gone black and scorched-looking in the heat instead.
Not petrified. Just too dry, for too long, to rot.
06Big Daddy, before sunrise
We warmed up on the smaller dunes near the lodge the afternoon before, which did not fully prepare us for Big Daddy, one of the tallest dunes in the world. We left at 5:30 in the morning to beat the heat and arrived first, which sounds like an advantage until you realise it means you're the ones making the first tracks up loose sand rather than following someone else's.
The climb is worse than it looks from the bottom and slower than you plan for. We were on the ridge by around half past eight, both of us out of breath, one of us nursing a sore knee the whole way up. This is the one we would put first if the list were ranked by what we still talk about, rather than by the order we rode them.
How we decide whether to turn off
There is no system, but there is a question, and it has been reliable enough that we now ask it out loud at junctions. Would we come back here specifically for this? If the honest answer is yes, the detour is worth a day. If the answer is no, we keep riding and put it on the list for the next trip.