Israel: The South

Moon over the Dead Sea

Over a month after returning, I am finally getting around to finishing up posting about my trip to Israel! After we left Jerusalem, we drove to the desert and stayed at a nature site by the Dead Sea. We were literally there for just a few hours, because we woke up at 3:45 the next morning for a sunrise hike up Masada, a mountain with ancient ruins of the fortress of Herod the Great from the first century BCE, which was then taken by the Romans in the first century CE. 

And despite a few clouds, the sunrise was beautiful. 

Model of Herod's fortress on Masada.

At the base of Masada.

After hiking down Masada, we got breakfast (which, at 9:30am, felt more like lunch, since we'd already been awake for 6 hours) and then drove to the Dead Sea. We were able to take a few hours and relax at a resort, get massages if we so chose (which I did choose), and float in the salty sea.

Let me just say that YES, the Dead Sea is as crazy as everyone says it is. The salt concentration is so high that nothing can live in it (hence the "dead" sea) and the bottom, in most places, is crystalized salt rocks. The water feels oily on your skin and is very good for dry skin. And you become so buoyant in the water that it's impossible NOT to float - it's actually kind of exerting to try to change positions, like from floating on your back to floating on your stomach. You have to fight against the water. It's very warm and relaxing, but only for a little while. It does get hot, but more than that, it's very dehydrating, and you're not supposed to stay in for more than 30 minutes at a time. Once upon a time, the Dead Sea floor was filled with nourishing mineral mud, but now it's in danger of disappearing, and aside from being illegal to remove, you just can't find it in most places. But they still sell mud in the gift shop, because even though it's rationed it's still sold legally, so we bought some for a few shekls and coated ourselves in mud, baked in the sun for about 15 minutes to get the full effects, and then went into the water.

After our lovely relaxing day at the Dead Sea (which by then felt like two days, since we'd done the sunrise hike that morning), we drove to the desert to a Bedouin camp and spent the night in a Bedouin tent. The 40 members of our group slept in one-half of a gigantic tent, on thin mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor, that looked like this:

It was an experience, I'll say that much. It totally undid any good that came from my back massage earlier that day! Sleeping on the floor was extremely uncomfortable but the experience over all wasn't that bad. We listened to a Bedouin man speak to us about his culture, but the problem was that joining us and two other Birthright groups was a whole brigade of Israeli teenagers (that couldn't have been older than 13 or 14) sharing the camp. They were clearly there for some school trip, and had their own dance club tent next door. So while an old Bedouin man was talking to 150 or so Jewish-American 20-somethings about Bedouin culture and playing us some songs on his lute-like instrument, we heard music like "Bad Romance" pumping loudly from the next tent over. It was very discordant. Aside from that, it was hard to stay awake because we'd been up for so long. After that we had dinner (the best part of which was dessert, baklava! Which is Arabic, not Jewish, so we hadn't had any yet on the trip. And it was sooooo good...) and then stood around bonfires and talked for the rest of the evening.

The next morning, we rode camels! I had really been looking forward to this. We were two to a camel, so there were 20 camels total, and I happened to be seated at the front of the first camel! Pretty cool.

On the whole, not too thrilling. Camels walk REALLY REALLY slowly. And it got cloudy and breezy and sprinkled rain just a bit, which is highly uncharacteristic for the Israeli desert in late March. But camels are just so goddamned funny - they look like cartoons, really, I couldn't stop thinking of Aladdin -  that I for one had a blast.

In the afternoon, we took a walk through the Negev Desert and visited Ben-Gurion's home and gravesite, up on a mountain overlooking the desert.

That evening we drove to back to Tel Aviv, which I posted about here, where we spent the next day (which was cold and rainy - in Tel Aviv! In March! Unheard of...) sightseeing and enjoying the stormy ocean scenery. We had our final dinner at Doktor Shakshuka (remember this recipe?), where we had the best meal of our trip by far, and then boarded our flight back to NYC. All in all a great trip - we really saw as much of the country as we could have in 10 days, and I would love to go back to Israel someday to see all of the things we didn't see.

Shalom!