Day 8 – The Judean Desert, Masada, and the Dead Sea

Here I am, the intrepid trekker in the Judean Desert wilderness.  Two reasons it’s white in the background:  1) it’s 107 degrees; and 2) the Dead Sea is behind me and the evaporating salt and chemicals in the water create an ever-present haze.  In the following photos, I’ve darkened everything so you can see something besides beige.
This is the dike Herod had built to channel the water to Masada.  See more info below.  You believe me about the beige thing now?

[Sidebar: as I write from Ecce Homo, it’s about 10 PM and the Muslim families have been celebrating weddings with firecrackers since about 7 PM (the Jewish families are home celebrating Seder).  It’s funny how one becomes accustomed to sounds.  The first night I was here, not knowing what gun fire sounds like, I thought something seriously wrong was happening until I saw colored sparkles in the sky.  Tonight I can only hear the noise, but since everyone around me is acting normally, I’m assuming it’s all clear.]

Back to the trip…

This was the first guided tour I’ve taken since being here.  There was some confusion about which tour company I was with (the booking agency hadn’t told me), but everything turned out fine.  Our guide, Sylvia, is from Scotland, and provided a good combination of facts and just letting us watch the beige scenery go by.  When we got to the top, she made learning fun (and I actually remember some of what she told us!)

Contrary to what I always thought (must have been faulty geography lessons), Death Valley is not the lowest spot on Earth.  It's actually only 282 FEET below sea level and  the Dead Sea is 1/4 of a MILE below.  (This isn't the most interesting aspect of the water/area.  I'm not going to go into a tutorial, but Wikipedia has some fascinating info.)  There are signs along the highway that tell you what the depths are as you head south from Jerusalem.  We drove by Jericho, Bedouin camps, and the caves where a goat shepherd found the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947.

Though there’s a way to walk to the top via what they call the Snake Path, I opted to ride in the gondola with the rest of the group.   Sylvia told me that they closed Masada for two days to build a more elaborate path to the top for Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea.  No comment.

Before inserting the photos of scenery, here’s a model of Masada in its hey-day.

Though not originally built by Herod, he took it over for a fortress/winter palace and made a "few" improvements sometime after 37 BCE.  (This place is OLD.)  He was a very clever fellow (aside from being excessively cruel), and solved the water problem (i.e. there IS no water) by designing a series of small aqueducts that carried deluges of rain (~6 times/year) into twelve cisterns (40,000 cubic feet of water!), which was then hauled to the top of the compound by donkeys.  We were just walking around up there, not hauling BIG rocks and painting murals.  I think the ISPCA and labor unions would have had a field day with this situation.

Our tour around the site went pretty fast, but I guess not fast enough to prevent a reaction to the heat.  (107, remember?).  It took a few minutes back on the gloriously air conditioned bus before I started feeling better.

Then on to Ein Gedi Spa, of which I have no pictures because I put my camera in a locker when I went to have a float.  Sylvia provided us with the following warnings: take off all jewelry (yes, off came every bracelet I have – first time in 10 years!), wear only plastic sandals (the stuff in the water corrodes anything else – plastic and roaches are gonna survive all of us!), and don’t drink the water or you’ll die.  After all of this, I had a hard time relaxing into the experience.  Though one could walk from the spa to the sea if one were so inclined, there’s a tractor that pulls visitors in “cars” like a ride through Universal Studios only it doesn’t cost $40 (it’s free).  One wades across a salt-crusted beach into shallow (and VERY hot) salt water and to a point that’s about 30 feet deep.  Long before that, I leaned back and sure enough, floated to the extent that I could have read a book without getting it wet.  Unfortunately, there were some waves and some water splashed on my lips.  I held my breath to see if it was going to turn out to be a good thing I drew up a will before I left Virginia.  You’ll be relieved to know that I survived (though I did float over to fresh water fountains out in the water).  I headed for the shower after about 10 minutes – floating is kinda boring if one doesn’t have a book to read – so I could get back to the Spa center to buy fabulous Dead Sea skin care products and have them to use at home without fear of dying.

Back on the bus at 4 PM for the 45-minute ride back to Jerusalem, then a taxi to Ecce Homo (there was no problem getting through the gate this time since there wasn’t going to be a procession – that’s why the driver couldn’t take me to the door when I arrived Monday).  I started packing and then went down to dinner.  Our table had a French woman, two French men, a man from Slovenia, my friend Anna from Miami (we’ve eaten together every night), a priest from Quebec (he, Ana, and I ate together the night before), and me.  The conversation started off with a bang when Anna said that she was glad the Slovenian and Frenchmen weren’t priests because she thinks women should be allowed to be priests.  I told her to buy an extra beer (she was in the habit of buying a beer to drink after dinner while saying the rosary) and drink it before dinner to calm down.  Everyone except the Slovenian was speaking French, so Anna and I spoke Spanish.  Well, Anna spoke Spanish.  I said some Spanish words in a format that vaguely resembled sentences.

Now I’ve showered off the sulphur (it took a a while to get used to that smell at the Spa) and am about finished getting ready to check out in the morning.  A taxi will fetch me at 9:30 AM and deliver me to my hotel in Tel Aviv for $90.  It’s a pretty good deal, considering there’s no public transportation running tomorrow due to it being the Sabbath.

The next posting will be from Tel Aviv.

Shalom!