Blogger’s note: This is the third of four chapters on our time spent in Israel in November, 2017. The first two can be found here and here.
We dropped off our rental car in Haifa, walked across the street, and caught the train to Jerusalem. Aside from having to find the entrance to the station in a shopping mall whose parking lot and bus terminal were under renovation, it really was that simple.
As I mentioned in my last article, Israel’s train network makes travel exceedingly easy, almost as if a metro rail extends across half the country. The day we left Haifa, though, was the end of the weekend, so the train was packed with students heading back to university and soldiers returning from leave. I have to admit – sharing space with college-age kids carrying assault rifles is a little unnerving.
We switched lines south of Tel Aviv to pick up the train to Jerusalem. That one was nearly empty, and the ride through the valleys of Israel was quiet, peaceful, and just a little bit eerie. When we disembarked, Lea and I were the only ones waiting for the bus to take us into the city.
Believe it or not, Lea and I weren’t sure there’d be enough in Jerusalem to interest us. We’d already checked off quite a few ancient history boxes and we’re not the “religious pilgrimage” type. We did want to see the Dead Sea and I was up for a visit to Masada (after watching the TV miniseries with Peter O’Toole as a kid in 1981), but beyond that we didn’t have any commitments.
And by commitments, I mean hotel reservations or plans of any kind after our first two nights. Aside from an excursion to see the two sites mentioned above, we had no firm idea how we were going to spend the rest of our time in Israel.
Our hotel was not too far from the Jaffa Gate, the western entrance into the Old City. By “not too far” I mean, of course, straight-line distance on the map. The walk wasn’t quite so easy, with at least one dead end and an extremely busy highway to cross (Yitshak Kariv). Plus, there were an awful lot of stairs to climb to reach the city walls.
Inside, the Old City is a maze of single-lane streets and stairways that blend into each other. Some are open to the sky while others are covered, giving whole sections of the ancient metropolis the feel of a two-thousand year old shopping mall. Stores and market stalls were everywhere, but the streets were so crowded that two travelers on our own didn’t draw the attention of aggressive touts as we had in other parts of the world.
We could have become lost quite easily had we not already had practice at navigating Old World mazes in Zanzibar and Marrakesh. However, while those places were flat, Jerusalem is multi-level, making it almost seem at times as if it was designed by M.C. Escher.
Our first stop after navigating the labyrinth was the Western Wall, the last standing remnant of the Second Temple and one of the holiest sites of the Jewish faith. The Wall is open to the public, as long as you obey the gender segregation rules: the larger section of the Wall is for men to pray, and the smaller for women. We were simply there to watch, but we accidentally crossed an invisible demarcation line and Lea got yelled at for not having a Y-chromosome. After that, we decided to take in the view from afar.
From afar is the only way to view the Dome of the Rock, the holy site of the Muslim faith, unless you’re willing to convert. We circled back into the maze of the Old City, got a little lost, and eventually found ourselves at a site that, I’m ashamed to admit, wasn’t even on my radar: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, first built in 326 by Emperor Constantine, enshrines what is believed to be the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb in which Jesus was buried. Within the church are several chapels and altars, a large rotunda, and the Stone of Anointing upon which Jesus’s body is believed to have been prepared for burial. The Church was packed with people following the Stations of the Cross as well as several guided tours, but it was still possible to view most of it on our own.
With sore legs, an evening to kill, and an excursion out of town scheduled for the next day, Lea and I retreated to our room, dined on microwave noodles from a gas station, and flipped through Fodor’s Israel and TripAdvisor to figure out how to spend the rest of our vacation. We were drawn toward the Negev Crater in the south of the country, both for its geology and the opportunity for stargazing tours. It became clear, though, that there was more in Jerusalem to interest us, so we made the executive decision to extend our visit. Luckily, our hotel was happy to let us stay on one extra night, and didn’t even need us to change rooms.
Well before dawn, we walked to a hotel just down the road, where a tour van would collect us and a passel of other travelers for a trip to Masada, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, and the Dead Sea. Our tour left so early in the morning because part of the package was the chance to climb Masada in the dark and view the sunrise from the top.
It sounded like a good idea at the time. I’m telling you now – it wasn’t.
Masada is an ancient mountain-top fortress built by Herod the Great during the third decade BCE. It was the location of a siege in 74 CE during which the Romans built a giant ramp in order to attack the large group of Jewish rebels hiding there. The rebels famously committed suicide rather than let themselves be taken.
Masada can be approached from either the west (the Roman ramp side) or the east (the Dead Sea side), but the two routes don’t intersect. Our tour brought us to the eastern side of the mountain, where there’s a cable car to take you to the top. The catch? The cable car doesn’t run until after sunup. And so we climbed.
The ascent takes at least an hour. It starts as a gentle slope, during which you keep asking “Where’s the mountain?” As it becomes steeper, you ask the same question while pausing for breath. Once you finally reach the mountainside you’ll wish you hadn’t, as you zig and zag up a steep rock face without the benefit of handrails. The hike began in total darkness, but twilight crept up our backs the closer we got to the summit. Important advice: don’t turn around. Don’t look down.
After my 500th “Are we there yet?” I reached the top, only to find it was all for naught. I’d climbed as fast as I could to take a photo of the sunrise, and the sky was a solid bank of cloud. I spent a little time exploring the ruins, but Masada hasn’t weathered the ages as well as other sites, and in most places there’s little left but the outlines of buildings and a few stone walls. The Dead Sea is easily visible, and from on high it’s also clear how much that great salt lake has shrunk in modern times.
If you thought the climb up was fun, let me tell you that the climb down is also a hoot. (On this tour, it was still too early for the cable car to be running.) The nice thing about the ascent, despite how hard it was on legs and lungs, is that I was facing the mountain the whole time, so if I’d tripped, I’d have fallen up and toward the mountain. On the way down, just as my legs were so tired they shook with every step, I was facing down and away, staring the whole time at the field of razor-sharp scree just waiting to break my plunge when my knees gave out. And they wanted to, they so wanted to.
We probably would have better enjoyed our next stop, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, if we hadn’t been so damn tired from hiking Masada. Ein Gedi is an oasis and wadi valley with hiking trails, waterfalls, botanical gardens, and ibex. We made it as far back as one of the waterfalls before giving out.
Next was a stop at the Dead Sea itself. We rode to the far northern tip, stopping at overlooks to take in the view. Because of its insanely high salt content, there’s something distinctly odd about it – the waves are more sluggish, the coastline is encrusted in white, and the receding waterline has left deposits like tree rings in the sandy basin.
And of course, because of the salt, it’s impossible to sink in it. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to take a dip, but we did get to wade out and experience the surreal buoyancy of lying on our backs in what felt like something between lake water and honey.
The other thing to do is to cover yourself in Dead Sea mud which, of course, is supposed to be great for your skin. I’m not sure how much I buy into that, but there are gift shops to sell all sorts of beauty products derived from Dead Sea salt. What I am sure of is that Dead Sea mud is nearly impossible to rinse off. Even when it’s gone, you’ll still feel an oily, sticky residue everywhere.
In retrospect, it might have been better to have driven ourselves. Because we’d taken an excursion, I felt rushed through each site we visited that day. Then again, taking our own car would have also involved driving in and out of Jerusalem (where the traffic was nightmarish) and crossing back and forth into Palestine (which might have been time-consuming in a whole different way). There is a lot to experience around the Dead Sea, though, and I would recommend giving yourself time to enjoy it.
On our extra, unplanned-for day in Jerusalem, it rained. That wasn’t the end of the world, but it did spoil any chance of walking along the Old City wall. We did hit the markets one last time and visit two museums.
The first was Yad Vashem: the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This museum has got to be the most exhaustive, richly-detailed, and breath-taking memorial to the victims of the Holocaust to be found anywhere. However, if you really want to experience it in depth, I have to recommend breaking in after hours. During the day, the museum is so crowded with tour groups that you can barely see the exhibits. It would also take an entire day to go through properly.
That night we visited the Israel Museum, a massive art museum that also houses the “Shrine of the Book” – a permanent standing exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls exhibit by itself should be amazing for any history nerd, but the museum as a whole, with its wide variety of artistic styles and exhibits, is world-class. It’s also a very large complex, so be ready for a lot of walking.
The thing about Jerusalem is that there’s a lot to take in. You could spend a week or two there and still have places to explore. Despite all the turmoil and strife in the region, it’s a city that lots of people visit and sometimes stay for good. We met more Americans in Jerusalem than anywhere else we’ve been outside of walled-off Caribbean resorts, but these Americans weren’t tourists – they lived there. Ancient and modern at the same time, it’s easy to see why scholars for centuries considered Jerusalem to be the center of the world.
Next time: We drive a rental car into a giant hole in the desert.
