Dakhla: kite lagoons at the end of the road

Dakhla sits at the end of a long spit of land in the far south of Western Sahara, a full day's drive from anything else. The approach sets you up to expect a ghost town: the road south passes settlements that look freshly built and completely empty – rows of new housing with nobody in them, waiting for people who have not arrived.

Then the town proves the approach wrong. Dakhla itself is alive: a working souk with fruit carts and date stalls, a fish market with the morning's catch laid out on the slabs, a promenade above the water, and mechanics who took our rally cars in mid-journey. It is not a polished tourist town – it is a working Saharan port that happens to sit beside kilometres of flat, windy lagoon.

That water is the reason to come. Head out to the lagoon and the energy the empty settlements promised to be missing is all there: this is a serious kitesurfing destination, and the resorts strung along the shore are where everyone is – eating, watching, waiting for wind.

You do not need to kite to enjoy it. A long lunch and an afternoon watching the sails is one of the better ways to spend a day this far south.

It works best as a break rather than a destination: a couple of nights to rest, eat well, and watch the kites between the long desert drives that bracket it.

The ghost towns are real – they are just not Dakhla. Judge the town by its market and its lagoon, not by the empty streets you passed on the way in.