When I left you hanging, dear readers, Lea and I had just been grilled to within an inch of “well done” by the airport security in Eilat. From there we took a plane back to Tel Aviv, took a train to the city itself, and slept for a few hours in a hotel connected to a giant shopping mall (after the mall had closed, which made finding the front desk a rat-in-a-maze challenge). The next morning we hopped right back on the train and headed north to the city of Haifa.
I have to give a shout-out to Israel’s wonderful (and cheap for how far it’ll take you) train system. Imagine a metro rail such as you’d expect in a major city, and extend it across most of a country. Granted, Israel is only the size of New Jersey, but their rapid transit makes getting from city to city a breeze. The rail system doesn’t cover the whole country, but it connects all the major stops up and down the Mediterranean coast and Jerusalem as well (which we’ll get to next time).
Haifa was not our final destination. As soon as we got there, we took a cab from the train to a car rental agency where we’d reserved the tiniest vehicle we could get our hands on. Since we’d also rented a car for the day in Eilat, this was our second overseas driving experience. In general, though, Israel was the first time we’d dared to dip our toes into the joys of operating a vehicle in another country.
A few words on driving in Israel:
1) The cars have pin numbers. In addition to using the key to enter and start the car, you have to punch in a code on a pad next to the steering wheel. Every time I did so, it felt like I was activating a self-destruct mechanism. Which is, in fact, what Lea and I started calling it.
2) You’re not going to be able to pump your own gas, so don’t even try. If you were Israeli you could, but the self-serve gas pumps require you to key in all sorts of extra codes which, I think, included the license number of the car and some kind of personal ID . It doesn’t help that all the digital pump displays are in Hebrew with no option to switch languages. Save your time, grab an attendant, and use hand-gestures to imply that you’d like to fill your tank.
3) Israelis love roundabouts. The country is full of them. I understand from a statistical standpoint that they’re much safer than four-way head-on interchanges, but I swear there were some roundabouts with no intersections at all – they was there for the fun of it.
4) Signs are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, unlike the monolingual gas stations. Before going to Israel, we were told that Waze was a more accurate navigation system there than Google Maps. The problem we discovered (at least in 2017, it might have changed by now) is that Waze only shows directions in the native language of whatever country you’re in. Unless you can read Hebrew, you’re pretty much out of luck.
The first place we navigated to was Beit She’Arim National Park, site of an ancient Jewish necropolis that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The huge complex of graves, tombs, and burial caves was an especially important site during the first centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, when many Jews both in Israel and abroad sought to be buried there. Today it’s a fascinating site to wander and see layers upon layers of history.
From there, we traveled east (after making a few wrong turns) toward the Sea of Galilee. First, I’ll admit there’s a weird feeling I got seeing freeway exits for places like “Nazareth.” Second, it should be pointed out that the Sea of Galilee isn’t a sea at all – it’s just a good-sized lake. It isn’t even the size it used to be: it and the Dead Sea have both been shrinking for decades due to more and more demands being placed on the Jordan River as a water supply. In 2018 (the year after we went) the Sea of Galilee dropped to its lowest point since official measurements began, passing the “black line” below which irreversible damage occurs.
The Sea of Galilee is already the lowest freshwater lake in the world, but to reach it you first drive up, up, up over a range of hills, and then down, down, down into the valley. We’d hoped to catch a view of the sunset across the sea, so I’d booked us lodgings on the eastern shore. Doing so, I’d inadvertently rented a cabin within the Golan Heights. According the Google Maps, when we were standing on the beach we were in Israel, but when we walked back to our cabin we were in territory disputed with Syria.
I’d made the reservation through Booking.com, which is what we also ended up using for 95% of our hostel stays in South America. One of the great things about Booking, and why I’m giving them free advertising here, is the feature that lets you print your reservation in both your own language and the language of wherever you happen to be staying. This came in handy when the proprietor of the lakeside camp where we were staying didn’t speak or read a word of English.
I’d thought it a stroke of luck that I’d found us a room on the east side of the lake when there weren’t many options to choose from. I’d imagined everything was in danger of being booked, when in fact we were there in the “dead” season for tourists. Our cabin was one of about a dozen or so that were attached to a closed water park, and we were the only guests. An ideal setting for a horror movie, but we did get to see our sunset.
The next day, we took a longer route back to Haifa, stopping at two sites of interest along the way. The first was Bet She’An, an extremely well-preserved Roman (and later Byzantine) city on the site of an even older Canaanite settlement. The city that you can see today lasted from 63 BCE until it was destroyed by an earthquake in 749.
When I say that you can see the city, I mean that you can actually see it and get a feel for what it was like 1500 years ago. Many other ancient ruins, such as the city of Volubilis in Morocco, are nothing today but the outline of ancient foundations. While much of Bet She’An is rubble, a lot of it is still there, with buildings, houses, baths, and an amphitheater mostly intact.
Our next stop for the day was Gan Hashlosha, a park containing spring-fed pools that maintain a constant temperature of 28°C. It’s a great place to take the family for a mid-day swim, so long as you don’t mind being constantly nibbled by the many tiny fish that populate the pools. Color me ticklish, but despite how pleasant the water was, being pecked by cute little wanna-be piranhas was a bit too much. The park is indeed lovely, so I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from going. I’d simply suggest that you bring along someone the fish might find tastier than yourself.
We made our way back to Haifa and checked into our hotel on top of Mount Carmel just in time for Shabbat. Israel takes Shabbat seriously – the country shuts down from sunset on Friday night to the same time on Saturday. This can prove a particular challenge to travelers, especially those who need laundry done. Realizing our predicament, we went out in search of any laundromat that might still be open. Doing this, we found another problem particular to the city of Haifa itself: Mount Carmel blocks nearly all cell and GPS signal on its northern face, where the bulk of the city is.
Find a laundry we finally did – one attached to a hostel full of foreign students. Unfortunately, we had to wait our turn at the machines, but to our good luck there was a pizza place just down the block that remained open on Shabbat as well.
Other interesting notes about Shabbat in Israel: Hotels have “Shabbat elevators” that run up and down, stopping on each floor, so that Orthodox observants don’t have to operate the control panel. Also, local ISPs may decide that Shabbat is a good day to shut down their network for maintenance.
While everything else shuts down, tourism still goes on. Not far from our hotel were the Baha’i Gardens. The Shrine of the Báb is one the holiest sites in the Baha’i faith, and the gardens above it are magnificent – if only you could see them up close. Above the garden is a viewing platform, crowded with tourists from buses, and at the bottom is a smaller garden around the shrine itself that you can actually walk through. The large portion of the gardens can only be visited via a pre-arranged guided tour, which we didn’t learn until later. Otherwise, the garden can only be viewed from afar, which is why all the pictures in postcards are taken from helicopter.
Leaving Haifa for the day, we drove down the coast to the ancient Roman city of Caesarea. The national park built around this old coastal port has turned it into – there’s no other way to put it – the most gentrified set of ruins we’ve ever seen. To be honest, we never even got as far as the main ruin complex itself, because between the parking and the old city is a maze of expensive restaurants and souvenir shops the size of a small amusement park. The parking lot was packed with plenty of people who weren’t observing Shabbat, and the whole park was crawling with families out to kill a Saturday.
After Bet She’An, Caesarea was a dud. I hate to put any national park on my “don’t bother” list, but I have to do so with Caesarea.
On the way back north, however, we made a little detour. On our original train ride to Haifa, I’d noticed what looked like a ruined castle along the coast, and I’d spotted it again while on the drive down. I managed to find it on the map, so before we returned to Haifa, Lea and I pulled off at the exit in Atlit and drove to the Château Pèlerin, a Crusader fortress built by the Templars in 1218. This isn’t really a tourist site – there’s no infrastructure save for a fishing pier and a fence around the ancient Crusader cemetery. However, it’s not a bad spot to watch the Mediterranean away from the tourist crowd.
And so concluded our first week in Israel. For the second half of our trip, we had plans for a train ride to Jerusalem, a hotel reservation for two nights near the heart of the city, and then… we had no idea. Here was the test: could we plan a vacation on the fly? Tune in next time to find out!
