Category: Israel

So a funny thing happened while I was writing these articles about Israel. Maybe you heard – a global pandemic broke out and brought all travel to a halt.

As such, it’s been hard to come back to this blog and celebrate exploring the world when it suddenly feels like traveling overseas is something we used to do. Right now, for example, I was supposed to be on a beach in Mexico. That ain’t going to happen anytime soon. This Christmas Lea and I are planning a trip to the south of England. Will we still be able to go? Who knows.

The hospitality industry is one of those that’s been struck hardest in the current crisis. I’m left to wonder how much the places we’ve traveled to in the past are being impacted, and how the many people we’ve met along the way are coping with the current situation.

History tells us that this too will pass, and that months or years from now the world will settle into a new “normal.” It would be foolish, though, to assume that everything will be as it was before. Just as how we travel and take precautions changed after 9/11, so too will the world be a different place once the COVID-19 fires die down.

Anyway, back to the story in progress:

After leaving Jerusalem, we picked up another rental car for our final Israeli expedition: a trip down Highway 40 into the Negev Desert. The Negev is the large, sparsely populated region that takes up the lower half of the country. Why go? To see Israel’s own Grand Canyon – the Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater) – and all the awesome geology that goes with it.

The road to the Ramon Crater goes through Avdat National Park, site of the McDonald’s that is the only place to stop for lunch on the drive. (In 2017, that was $21 US for two scrawny burgers and stringy fries.) Looming over the fast food joint, however, is an ancient, mountain-top Nabatean city that was once the next stop on the spice road after Petra. And wonder of wonders, unlike almost all the other mountain-top ruins we’ve visited, you can actually drive up to this one. (I’m looking at you, Masada.)

The city was founded in the 3^rd century BC, lasted until 700 AD, and is still well preserved for a place that no one’s lived in for over a thousand years. Sections of the city show the influence of the original Nabateans as well as the later Roman and Byzantine occupants. Overlooking the desert and the old spice route are the pillars of an ancient Nabatean temple and remains of a slightly less ancient Christian church.

Not long after leaving Avdat we came to Mitzpe Ramon, the town on the edge of Ramon Crater, where Lea witnessed this rocket scientist trying to sit his daughter on the back of a wild Nubian ibex.

Despite the name, Ramon Crater isn’t a crater. Instead, it’s the world’s largest box canyon, formed by erosion over the last five million years. We planned to spend the night in Mitzpe Ramon, but we still had plenty of daylight to burn, so off we went over the edge of the cliff!

Highway 40, which continues all the way south to Eilat, takes a switchback down the north face of the crater and crosses the valley floor, with many convenient pull-offs to see the geologic wonders of the area.

The first we came to was the Carpentry, a mound of unusual black rocks that resembles a giant pile of wood. The rocks are made of sandstone that was superheated by hydrothermal activity and cooled into crystalline shapes.

The next stop on the geology trail was the Painted Rock Park. At various points in the past, magma baked the sandstone of the region into quartzite of a variety of colors, depending on the different minerals in the magma and the temperatures at which the rocks were formed (or so the sign says). This particular area has multi-colored boulders arranged for travelers to view up close, but the differing colors of sandstone can be seen in many places throughout the park. From this pull-off you can see a particularly stunning cross-section of strata that looks like a rainbow in rock.

Saving the best for last, we came to the  crater’s Ammonite Wall. This site is a medium-short hike from the road, but it’s definitely worth the trek. Ammonites (and Lea will surely double-check me on this) were marine mollusks that went extinct along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Here in the park is a place where an undersea mudslide buried an entire colony, and they can now be seen preserved forever in the rock. Ammonites weren’t your run-of-the-mill garden snails either – these suckers were huge.

There’s plenty of natural beauty to stare at in Ramon Crater. If you’re up for biking and backpacking, there are trails galore. However, the temperature had dropped substantially during our two weeks in Israel, so even if we were up for exerting ourselves, the weather wouldn’t have been kind.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner that night in Mitzpe Ramon, then took the last tour of our two week vacation – a star tour of the Negev night sky from Astronomy Israel. Desert skies are ideal for stargazing, especially in places so far from city lights. When we were there in the day, the clouds were still hanging on from the rain system that had recently moved through the country. After dinner, we received the all-clear – the clouds had moved on and the sky was ready. It was also really, really cold, but the tour guide had blankets to spare.

Gratuitous photo gallery of Ramon Crater follows:

On our final day, we took a last look at the crater from the rim, then drove back to Tel Aviv. For as big of a city as it is, there’s not much for a traveler to see there, or at least so it seemed to us. Tel Aviv is a busy metropolis where people actually live and work, and feels like the most modern city in Israel. After all our time spent soaking in the history of Petra, Galilee, Jerusalem, and the Negev, we used our day in Tel Aviv just to walk along the Mediterranean.

And yet, there was still one thing for me to geek out about: Andromeda’s Rock.

Hear me out. Modern Tel Aviv was built on the site of the ancient city of Jaffa (a.k.a. Joppa) – in myth, the home of such figures as Queen Cassiopeia and Princess Andromeda, and the start and end point for the quest of the hero Perseus. The oldest district of the city is still called Jaffa Port. At the end of all the piers and wharves is a series of rocky outcrops that constantly get bashed by the waves. The last of those rocks, according to tradition, is where Andromeda was meant to be sacrificed to the Kraken. According to Hollywood, here’s how it would have looked three thousand years ago, give or take a few embellishments.

We had to be at the airport shortly after 1:00 a.m., but we booked a room at a beachside hotel anyway just to have a place to relax until midnight. Our flight out of Israel landed in Istanbul in the wee hours of the morning, where we wandered around the airport in a daze before climbing on our direct 13-hour return trip to the States. I’m not sure we were aware what day/time/year it was when we finally got home.

And that was it for 2017. Who knows what travel will be like in 2020 going forward? I often sign off by saying that The Escape Hatch will ever be open, but for now I’ll raise a glass of Cuban rum to all of us hunkering down at home.

Stay mindful, stay healthy, stay hopeful! The Escape Hatch will return.

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 500^th “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.

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!