Alright, so this is going to be a fairly long post about the absurd amount of hiking I did during the Succot vacation. So, to begin with, I ended up going on the school trip to Masada and the Dead Sea. This entailed a 4 hour long bus ride very very early in the morning, which actually wasn't so bad. Now, the thing to remember about Masada is that its sole purpose was as a fortified escape encampment. This means that it was built on top of a really big hill. Really. Big. However, I was unaware of that because we approached and hiked Masada from the Roman Ramp, so called because the Romans built it to lay siege to the place. The history of Masada is actually pretty interesting, it is where the Jews made their last stand during their rebellion and it has some very impressive reservoir things for catching and storing the water from flash floods. What I found most interesting about Masada though, was the way down, aka the Snake Path. The Snake Path's name is derived from the fact that it is a series of switchbacks which seem to be literally stacked on top of each other, like a snake winding up the side of the mountain. This was a rather terrifying trek for me, but I really felt for the people going up the path (I was going down). What was especially funny were all the little kids, like 5-8 yr olds, whose parents were dragging them up this horribly step winding path on what I can only assume to be the worst vacations imaginable.
After we were done hiking down the mountain we went to the Dead Sea to float, which is really all you can do in the Dead Sea. I got in the water and found it very hard to keep myself actually in the water itself, so instead I just went with it and floated for a while. I also helped a bunch of people from our group pick salt crystals from the bottom near the shore, because they look cool and apparently make good bath salts or something like that. The principle downsides of the Dead Sea were these: The smell and the burns. I am not sure if the entire Sea smells like the part I was in, but that part reeked of sulfur and methane (it was like swimming in farts). Additionally, the salt started to eat at you after a while and the little cuts on my hands started to really sting. I also discovered that most people can only stay in the water for a few minutes before their nether regions begin to burn something awful. Which brings me to a funny story one of the guys in our group told me. When he was on his birthright trip (a thing where Jewish kids go to Israel for free and have fun for a weeks or something) there were two among their number who decided to just have lots and lots of sex while on birthright. In accordance with this decision, they decided to try and have sex while in the Dead Sea. Both had to be rushed to the hospital immediately (I found this hilarious). After I got out I rinsed of thoroughly and we set off for our next destination.
That next destination turned out to be a Bedouin camp where we spent the night in this massive tent. We also made our own food and I was on pita patrol, which meant that I helped build the fire and cook the pita which was being made by other people. I mostly just stood there and held a plate where people put the cooked pitas. I would say that the other people on that particular job ate about 1/6 pitas that they cooked, but whatever. Afterward we had some horrible wine (it was like sangria but almost painfully sweet) and went to bed.
The next day we woke up and got ready for yet another hike, this one to the En Gedi National Park, which is a lush and beautiful oasis in the middle of the desert and right across from the Dead Sea (but without the smell). I don't have any pictures of En Gedi because we were hiking in water most of the time and I didn't want to risk my camera. That being said, I hiked then entire time in my brown hiking boot looking shoes which, it turns out, are mostly water proof. So once I got water into them it stayed there until I emptied my shoes again later, which was irritating. Also, on the way back I kept nearly getting scalped by the trees. But it was an incredibly beautiful hike which made me think of the Grand Canyon but with trees. After this point in the trip everyone else went back to Haifa except for Summer, Miri, and I who waited for a bus to Eilat so we could continue on to Dahab, in the Sinai Peninsula.
There isn't really much to tell about this first trip to Eilat really except to mention that the entire city smells a lot better a night, because during the day it reeks of pee, rot, sewage, and garbage. During the night it just smells like the ocean. Eilat is also called the City of Sins, but I didn't see anything which seemed to warrant that epithet.
When we reached Taba, the border crossing between Egypt and Israel, we were initially going to take a bus to Dahab which is about 2.5 hours away. But Summer (who speaks Arabic and spent a semester or something in Cairo last year) haggled a taxi down to a reasonable price of 30 Egyptian pounds. As a reference point, that is equal to about $6. She had to fight with the cabbie the entire ride down to Dahab (and managed to consistently call his bluffs about abandoning us by the roadside) until he finally delivered us to are destination: the Penguin Village. This turned out to be a very nice and reasonably priced hotel. We got three nights with complimentary breakfast, a sunset camel ride, a night hike up Mt Sinai, a snorkeling trip, and an all day hike to the Colored Canyon and the White Canyon all for approximately 75 euro (about $110). The next few days proved to be very hectic and I didn't get much sleep.
Once arrived, settled in, and had a delicious dinner, we went on our sunset camel ride. I was surprised by three things about camels. The first is how their legs work. If any of you have some free time I would recommend trying to find a video on the internet of a camel sitting down because their leg joints bend in a decidedly weird way. The second is how snake-like their necks are. My first impression of them was that someone had taken a furry snake and jammed it into a camel body. The last is the sound they make. For some reason I was under the impression that camels were mute, like giraffes or rabbits. It turns out they make this odd yet vaguely frightening sound. If you remember the tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park, imagine that thing giving out a really large watery burp instead of a roar and that is what camels sound like. My camel was named Shakespeare for reasons which are entirely unknown to me as he did not seem overly creative or theatrical. Our guide was named was a Bedouin guy named Ramadan who we would later ran into a couple more times in town. We rode the camels for about 20 minutes (which really hurt my inner thighs) then got off and hiked a bit to the top of a small but rocky hill to watch the sun set over the town of Dahab and the Red Sea. We also drank an absurd amount of Bedouin Tea, which is a welcoming tea they give to guests. It is served in these little shot glass things and I must have had 5 during our break, then 2 more at Ramadan's uncle's house, then 2 more at Ramadan's house. I'm not quite sure why we went to those places, but I think they were just being hospitable while our ride back to the hotel showed up. At the end of this I had to tip Ramadan (on account of me being the only guy in the group) and in Egypt you apparently have to tip by placing the money in you palm and then transferring it via handshake. As you might have guessed, I was incredibly bad at this and really awkward about it to boot. After we got back we had about an hour to rest before heading off to Mt. Sinai.
The drive to Mt Sinai took about 2 hours and sucked because the van was very full and my available leg room was about 4 inches shorter than the length of my upper leg, so I was sitting sideways the entire way. We arrived at the mountain at about 1am and commenced hiking. We had yet another Bedouin guide but I cannot remember his name. What I do remember is that he struck me as being like and Arab Peter Pan due to his ability to practically fly up and down the mountain and suddenly appear in places he could not possibly have reached without being seen. Now, much like at Masada, there are two possible paths of approach for hiking up Mt Sinai: The Camel Path and the 3,700 Steps of Repentance. Needless to say, we took the Camel Path, which meant about 3 hours of hiking (but we took the Steps back down). The hike itself was pretty uneventful, the only thing worth mentioning is the little old lady who was in front of me on the final 750 stairs before we reached the summit of the mountain. To put it simply, that lady was booking it and I was struggling to keep up with her. She had a cane in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and an apparently indomitable determination to reach the top before dawn. Once we actually got to the top I rented a blanket and Summer rented a ground pad and we sat down on a very inclined portion of the top of the mountain to wait for sunrise. Of course, it turned out that we were on the wrong side of the mountain to see sunrise, so we ended up standing behind this huge crowd of people waiting for the sun. I have a lot of trouble standing on inclined planes for long periods of time without falling over, so I kept sitting down because even though the sky was getting lighter, the sun wasn't there yet. Because of this I nearly missed the sunrise due to the fact that the sun rose incredibly fast. Once it began to be visible over the horizon it was fully up in about 20 seconds. Then of course we had to get down the mountain and that took a while because there were probably a couple hundred people up there. We left our guide at the to to look for straggler be he managed to magically appear stretched out between two rocks near the bottom like some sort of middle eastern leprechaun (I never saw him pass me and there was only one path) to give us instructions for later. At the bottom of Mt Sinai is St Catherine's Monastery which houses one of the largest extent collections of Orthodox Iconography in existence. I would have gotten pictures of this, but the monks wouldn't let me. They also made me wear this sarong looking thing because the bottoms of my knees were showing beneath the end of my shorts. It was kind of embarrassing.
When we returned to Dahab we changed into our swim stuff and went out to the Blue Hole to go snorkeling. The Blue Hole is a coral formation which drops about 285ft about 20ft from the shoreline and a lot of divers die there every year. I had to teach Summer and Miri how to use their snorkels, which took a while because Miri had never used one before and Summer was afraid of sharks for some reason. During our snorkel time I discovered that I can no longer see in focus under water, which made me sad. That being said I could still make out a whole bunch of fish and corals, the only ones I could name being lion fish and brain coral. My inner fisherman really wished that I had a net and a fishing license, but seeing as how I had neither I somehow managed to restrain myself from trying to illegally fish with my bare hands. After this we had dinner and I finally got to sleep.
The next day we went hiking in the Colored Canyon and the White Canyon, both of which were highly reminiscent of pictures I have seen of the Grand Canyon. The two hikes together took about 12 hours. Our guide didn't speak English though for some reason so I don't really know anything about either of them. The one thing worth mentioning is that at one of the many (there are like a thousand of these things) checkpoints on the way to the canyons, the Egyptian police dudes took my and Summer and Miri's passports. We asked if we would get them back and our guide's response was something in Arabic which meant "If God Wills it," which is most definitely not what I want to hear when it comes to my passport. They had to hold them because we did not have visas to enter mainland Egypt (only the Sinai). Now, we were still about 9 hours by car from mainland Egypt so I'm not quite sure of their logic but whatever, I got it back in the end.
The day after that we checked out and hopped a buss to Taba to cross back into Israel. Unfortunately, there were 6 guys on the bus who had to get out at every single checkpoint and this caused the 2 hour drive to extend into a four hour drive which, in turn, meant that we missed all buses to Haifa from Eilat (it was also the last day of Succot so everything had closed early). This meant that we were stranded in Eilat until the next day. Of course, seeing as how Eilat is the beach vacation city of Israel, there were worse places to be stranded. So we checked into the same hostel we had stayed in before and went to go get dinner. It is important to mention that I was feeling very very sick for some reason at this point and could barely stomach food. This problem was further exacerbated by what appeared to be either a broken water main (hopefully) or a broken sewer line (hopefully not). I say hopefully on the water main because as we were walking a police car sped past us and completely soaked the left side of my body in whatever it was and I very nearly lost it right there. The next we sunbathed for 3 hours then went to the bus station.
Eventually we made it back to Haifa (after a 6 hour bus ride) and I got to sleep for about 6 hours before having classes all the next day. The day after that we had a big thunder storm which shut down the dorm's elevator so I now have to walk up 9 stories to get to literally everything. My favorite part of the trip was that everyone in Dahab thought I was Arab. Some thought I was Egyptian, but most said that I looked Moroccan or Tunisian. However, in Israel, no one thinks I look Arab. I plan on using this to my advantage when vising other Arab countries in the future in order to avoid being hassled.
And Now for Pictures:
1. Ramadan taking a smoke break on the mountain overlooking Dahab
2. Me on a Camel
3. Me in the Colored Canyon
4. A bush which is either the burning bush or its descendant
5. Sunrise on Mt Sinai
6. Me floating in the Dead Sea
7. The Snake path down Masada (it ends at the building in the upper right hand corner)
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