Sorry. Just had an email pointing out that comments are turned off. I'd completely failed to notice.
This is because the blog was dormant for a year or so, and I blocked comments because I was getting fed up with the spam.
Now I'm blogging about my time in Jerusalem, I've re-enabled them, so on the off-chance anyone wants to say anything, they can do. Don't all rush in at once ...
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Desert Roadtrip – Part Two, Ein Gedi
Once we’d finished at Qumran, we drove down to Ein Gedi, on the south-western shore of the Dead Sea. It’s a little oasis on the edge of the desert, and is well known for its nature reserve.
Joanna had booked us a room in a hostel there, and it was surprisingly nice: our own room between us; clean and modern, an all-you-can-eat buffet for dinner; plus a balcony to sit out on late at night, drinking Goldstar and playing card games. Couldn’t ask for more!
In the morning we set out for the nature reserve. Ein Gedi, which literally means “the spring of the goat”, unsurprisingly has a lot of goats (well, ibexes really) and, you’ve guessed it, a spring. On the way up the hillside towards the spring, there are four or five waterfalls with natural pools at the bottom, which are brilliant bathing spots. We had a dip in most of them on our way up. In the desert sun, we dried out completely walking from one pool to the next.
There’s a huge amount of wildlife. There are hyraxes scurrying in and out of the rocks – they look a bit like oversized hamsters. Dragonflies buzz around everywhere. You can see frogs and crabs in the bottom of the pools, and occasionally lizards by the poolside. Looking up to the cliffs, there are ibexes camouflaged against the rocks; they blend in perfectly. The sky is full of little black birds with orange wingtips, called Tristram’s starlings.
We left the nature reserve, and headed towards the Dead Sea. Rather than just run to the public beach and jump in, we decided to treat ourselves to an afternoon at the Ein Gedi spa complex, which offers a range of different pools, and access to the Dead Sea (which is really a lake, despite the name).
We started off at the indoor sulphur pools. The first thing that hits you is the smell: eggy and acrid and tangy. The water feels warm and oily, but it’s actually quite pleasant. The most striking thing is how buoyant you are in it – you float on the surface without even trying. You’re strictly limited to 15 minutes in the sulphur pools, and to be honest, that was about the longest my sinuses could take.
Outside the complex, there’s a mud bath. Or to be more accurate, it’s a big flat area with a huge tub of Dead Sea mud in the middle. You’re supposed to rub the stuff all over yourself, exfoliate a bit, and then rinse off. You get a choice of showers: sulphur water or normal.
Then, there’s the Dead Sea itself. Or rather: the huge salt flat where the Dead Sea used to be. When the spa complex was built, it was right on the shore, but the waters have been retreating at an alarming rate for many years. The Dead Sea is fed by the River Jordan, but both Israel and Jordan use the river as a water supply, and have dammed it further upstream. There just isn’t enough water coming through to keep the Dead Sea going, and the waters have receded to the point where they’re now about half a mile from the spa. You have to travel there by shuttle bus.
On the bus journey, you can see placards in the sand, showing where the waterline used to be at various dates. It’s terrifying. At what looks like a quarter of a mile from the Dead Sea, there’s a sign reading 2001. Maybe a few hundred yards away, there’s a sign reading 2004. It’s shrinking fast, and it’s been shrinking very recently. The place is an ecological disaster.
You need proper footwear to go into the Dead Sea. The lakebed is hard crystallised salt, and it’s spiky. The water is about 35% salt, and when you get in, you can feel every single minor cut and scrape on your body. After a day and a half of climbing up caves and springs and chasing ibexes, I had a fair few, and they stung like hell for the first few minutes.
Because of the high salt content, the water is much denser than normal water, and denser than human beings, so you can float very easily. In fact, you can’t really swim – you just sort of glide over the surface, and it’s hard to get any speed. You also need to really work hard to avoid getting the water in your eyes, or else you’re in real trouble. At one point, I accidentally got a faceful (whilst wearing contact lenses, ouch!) and was more or less blind. Jonathan had to guide me back to the showers on the shore so I could stick my head under them. It cleared up in seconds, thankfully, but it’s best avoided.
Once we finished in the Dead Sea, we got the shuttle bus back to the spa complex, got cleaned up, and hit the road in the direction of Masadah – which is where I’ll pick things up in Part Three. Assuming I survive preparations for my Hebrew speaking exam on Thursday.
Joanna had booked us a room in a hostel there, and it was surprisingly nice: our own room between us; clean and modern, an all-you-can-eat buffet for dinner; plus a balcony to sit out on late at night, drinking Goldstar and playing card games. Couldn’t ask for more!
In the morning we set out for the nature reserve. Ein Gedi, which literally means “the spring of the goat”, unsurprisingly has a lot of goats (well, ibexes really) and, you’ve guessed it, a spring. On the way up the hillside towards the spring, there are four or five waterfalls with natural pools at the bottom, which are brilliant bathing spots. We had a dip in most of them on our way up. In the desert sun, we dried out completely walking from one pool to the next.
There’s a huge amount of wildlife. There are hyraxes scurrying in and out of the rocks – they look a bit like oversized hamsters. Dragonflies buzz around everywhere. You can see frogs and crabs in the bottom of the pools, and occasionally lizards by the poolside. Looking up to the cliffs, there are ibexes camouflaged against the rocks; they blend in perfectly. The sky is full of little black birds with orange wingtips, called Tristram’s starlings.
We left the nature reserve, and headed towards the Dead Sea. Rather than just run to the public beach and jump in, we decided to treat ourselves to an afternoon at the Ein Gedi spa complex, which offers a range of different pools, and access to the Dead Sea (which is really a lake, despite the name).
We started off at the indoor sulphur pools. The first thing that hits you is the smell: eggy and acrid and tangy. The water feels warm and oily, but it’s actually quite pleasant. The most striking thing is how buoyant you are in it – you float on the surface without even trying. You’re strictly limited to 15 minutes in the sulphur pools, and to be honest, that was about the longest my sinuses could take.
Outside the complex, there’s a mud bath. Or to be more accurate, it’s a big flat area with a huge tub of Dead Sea mud in the middle. You’re supposed to rub the stuff all over yourself, exfoliate a bit, and then rinse off. You get a choice of showers: sulphur water or normal.
Then, there’s the Dead Sea itself. Or rather: the huge salt flat where the Dead Sea used to be. When the spa complex was built, it was right on the shore, but the waters have been retreating at an alarming rate for many years. The Dead Sea is fed by the River Jordan, but both Israel and Jordan use the river as a water supply, and have dammed it further upstream. There just isn’t enough water coming through to keep the Dead Sea going, and the waters have receded to the point where they’re now about half a mile from the spa. You have to travel there by shuttle bus.
On the bus journey, you can see placards in the sand, showing where the waterline used to be at various dates. It’s terrifying. At what looks like a quarter of a mile from the Dead Sea, there’s a sign reading 2001. Maybe a few hundred yards away, there’s a sign reading 2004. It’s shrinking fast, and it’s been shrinking very recently. The place is an ecological disaster.
You need proper footwear to go into the Dead Sea. The lakebed is hard crystallised salt, and it’s spiky. The water is about 35% salt, and when you get in, you can feel every single minor cut and scrape on your body. After a day and a half of climbing up caves and springs and chasing ibexes, I had a fair few, and they stung like hell for the first few minutes.
Because of the high salt content, the water is much denser than normal water, and denser than human beings, so you can float very easily. In fact, you can’t really swim – you just sort of glide over the surface, and it’s hard to get any speed. You also need to really work hard to avoid getting the water in your eyes, or else you’re in real trouble. At one point, I accidentally got a faceful (whilst wearing contact lenses, ouch!) and was more or less blind. Jonathan had to guide me back to the showers on the shore so I could stick my head under them. It cleared up in seconds, thankfully, but it’s best avoided.
Once we finished in the Dead Sea, we got the shuttle bus back to the spa complex, got cleaned up, and hit the road in the direction of Masadah – which is where I’ll pick things up in Part Three. Assuming I survive preparations for my Hebrew speaking exam on Thursday.
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Desert Roadtrip – Part One, Qumran
During my studies here in Jerusalem, I’ve met three PhD whizzkids from Harvard: Cian, Jonathan and Joanna. They’re researching biblical Hebrew, theology, ancient history, and loads of other exciting and esoteric stuff, I’m sure. They’d been thinking of going to visit some of the archaeological sites around the Dead Sea – Qumran, Masadah – and after I expressed an interest, they invited me along.
To maximise our time, we decided to skive off an afternoon of classes. Jonathan had hired a car, so we drove out of Jerusalem and due east into the heart of the West Bank. Jerusalem is up in the hills, and the terrain dips very sharply as you come out of the city. There’s what appears to be a checkpoint on the other side of the motorway, as you come back into the city, but no one stops you on the way out.
Qumran is on the coast of the Dead Sea, about 30 miles from Jerusalem, and it takes less than an hour to get there. It’s very much on the beaten track, just off the main road and well marked out with brown tourist roadsigns. It looks so normal, it’s easy to forget where you are.
The caves around Qumran are famous as the location where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and 50s. As you look up into the cliffs around you, you can see the caves where the scrolls were found. On a rocky plateau in the middle stand the ruins of a settlement from the 1st centuries BCE and CE: possibly the home of the same sect of Jews who wrote the scrolls and hid them in clay pots in the surrounding terrain (although there is some serious debate about this in academic circles).
The site is not big – less than five minutes to walk the perimeter. Half broken-down walls show you exactly where the buildings would have been, and what size the rooms were. Looking around, you get the impression that it must have been very similar to a monastery. The Jews who lived there built no fewer than seven mikvehs – Jewish ritual baths – they had a large, long communal dining room, and a room for studying at night, where archaeologists discovered a large number of oil lamps.
We decided to hike up to one of the caves. This turned out to be a bad move. We were in a desert, it was the middle of the day, we were running out of water, and the cave we picked – although it had looked all right from the ground – turned out to be unreachable without climbing ropes, at least, according to a helpful signpost placed about three quarters of the way up the mountainside by the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, prophesying death and destruction upon our heads if we attempted to do it without professional equipment.
We took a break, recovered from the heat exhaustion in the shade of a large rocky outcrop, and clambered back down again. Once we were back at the ruins, we noticed a small, friendly looking cave much lower down, so we hiked up to that instead. It was small, not very exciting, full of batshit, and clearly didn’t have enough space for any ancient scrolls. It probably wasn’t an official Qumran cave at all. But we made it to a cave in the end, and that’s what counts.
From Qumran, we drove down back into Israel proper, towards our next stopover at Ein Gedi. There was a checkpoint on the way in, but in our tourist gear, and driving our hire car with Israeli numberplates, we were waved through.
I’ll pick up the rest of the story tomorrow in another exciting instalment.
To maximise our time, we decided to skive off an afternoon of classes. Jonathan had hired a car, so we drove out of Jerusalem and due east into the heart of the West Bank. Jerusalem is up in the hills, and the terrain dips very sharply as you come out of the city. There’s what appears to be a checkpoint on the other side of the motorway, as you come back into the city, but no one stops you on the way out.
Qumran is on the coast of the Dead Sea, about 30 miles from Jerusalem, and it takes less than an hour to get there. It’s very much on the beaten track, just off the main road and well marked out with brown tourist roadsigns. It looks so normal, it’s easy to forget where you are.
The caves around Qumran are famous as the location where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and 50s. As you look up into the cliffs around you, you can see the caves where the scrolls were found. On a rocky plateau in the middle stand the ruins of a settlement from the 1st centuries BCE and CE: possibly the home of the same sect of Jews who wrote the scrolls and hid them in clay pots in the surrounding terrain (although there is some serious debate about this in academic circles).
The site is not big – less than five minutes to walk the perimeter. Half broken-down walls show you exactly where the buildings would have been, and what size the rooms were. Looking around, you get the impression that it must have been very similar to a monastery. The Jews who lived there built no fewer than seven mikvehs – Jewish ritual baths – they had a large, long communal dining room, and a room for studying at night, where archaeologists discovered a large number of oil lamps.
We decided to hike up to one of the caves. This turned out to be a bad move. We were in a desert, it was the middle of the day, we were running out of water, and the cave we picked – although it had looked all right from the ground – turned out to be unreachable without climbing ropes, at least, according to a helpful signpost placed about three quarters of the way up the mountainside by the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, prophesying death and destruction upon our heads if we attempted to do it without professional equipment.
We took a break, recovered from the heat exhaustion in the shade of a large rocky outcrop, and clambered back down again. Once we were back at the ruins, we noticed a small, friendly looking cave much lower down, so we hiked up to that instead. It was small, not very exciting, full of batshit, and clearly didn’t have enough space for any ancient scrolls. It probably wasn’t an official Qumran cave at all. But we made it to a cave in the end, and that’s what counts.
From Qumran, we drove down back into Israel proper, towards our next stopover at Ein Gedi. There was a checkpoint on the way in, but in our tourist gear, and driving our hire car with Israeli numberplates, we were waved through.
I’ll pick up the rest of the story tomorrow in another exciting instalment.
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