it's very, very dry here.
Today's itinerary:
Bet She'an
The West Bank
Jericho
Qumran
The Dead Sea
Looooong driving day. We drove from Tiberias to the resort area at the south end of the Dead Sea, which took us all the way down the West Bank, through the Palestinian Authority.
Darin and I woke up around 5:30am. Darin said to me, "I hate this hotel, let's switch," and I said, "Okay." Of course, we were checking out anyhow. (Among several other egregious annoyances, there are no king size beds in this hotel--we had two twin beds pushed together...but made separately.)
We checked out of the hotel early and headed to Bet She'an, an archaeological dig of an ancient city, which was also known as Scythopolis, one of the Decapolis.
I have come to the conclusion that the top 5 occupations listed on tax returns in Israel are:
-
5. Falafel maker
4. Hummus maker
3. Tour guide
2. Freedom fighter/terrorist
1. Archaeologist
I left everyone at the gate to use the rest room, so Mitch and Scott were waiting for me at the entrance to the city and saw my reaction: "Oh wow." They both laughed.
Bet She'an is a huge site, mainly comprising the downtown of this Classical city. Giant columns lined the street (unless they were moved to the Giant Column Graveyard, which was off to the side).
"Okay, everybody smile! At least look at the camera!"
Bet She'an also has the biggest ancient theater in Israel (and the top third hasn't even been reconstructed and is left to the imagination).
The theater at Bet She'an: where are our seats?
The city also had an amphitheater a little distance away.
It was wonderful to walk through the ruins and imagine what it must have been like: the giant bathhouse, the commercial street, the temple to Dionysius.
Carole considers redecorating the digs at home.
On our way out of Bet She'an, we not only ran into the Highland Park Strings, but the Canadian tourists as well. Convinced we were, in fact, being followed, we immediately bought some chocolate at the souvenir stand and hit the road.
We drove over the River Jordan (which is more like the Creek Jordan--however, there was a special baptismal center set up to keep pilgrims from trying to baptize each other just anywhere down the river and getting themselves in trouble doing so) and headed down the West Bank. There's a fence with barbed wire several miles to the west of the border, to keep civilians looking for a good picnic spot from wandering down to the riverside and getting shot by the Jordanians (when the Jordanians were doing that sort of thing). I asked if Israel was going to take the fence down, and Micky said no: they have peace with Jordan now, but 50% of Jordanians are Palestinians, so who knows?
Micky likes talking about the Palestinians. Everybody hates them, he says: don't they ever stop to ask why? They make trouble wherever they go. "They're like the Jews." He said that when Clinton went to visit the Palestinians, they made thousands of American flags and every child waved one; then Clinton bombed Iraq and they burned the flags. Didn't they realize what that would look like?
We stopped at Jericho after a long bus ride. There's an archaeological dig there, but nothing major. Micky was disappointed with how the Palestinians were maintaining the place. He gave a little history of what's been found and the endless search for those damn walls. In short: no walls have been found in Jericho, despite everybody's best efforts; the Palestinians, however, have put up a sign over some incredibly old ruins saying these are the walls.
The walls over the walls of Jericho.
The best thing in the area is the monastery on the Mount of Temptation, built on the spot reputed to be where Jesus fasted and was tempted by Satan. The monastery was originally built in the 5th century, so we can take the whole "this is the spot" thing with a grain of salt. They're building a cable car from the archaeological dig up to the monastery, because there's no way to get up there except by donkey.
And somehow they built a monastery up there. Eeek.
There was a giant outdoor market at the tourist center that had some very tasty looking produce on it. Mitch went to go check it out.
Kinda makes you hungry, no?
There are 6 million people in the state of Israel; Micky, I have decided, knows all of them. Everywhere he goes, he knows everybody and chats away with them, switching from English to Hebrew to Arabic to one of the 12 other languages he knows. No, seriously.
Micky says hello to yet another one of his friends.
(Okay, I faked this photo. Not entirely, but...there was a palm tree right behind the camel's head and the same color as the camel, so it looked as though there was a palm tree growing out of the camel's head. With the magic of Photoshop, I have sloppily removed the palm tree from the photo. Here is the real photo. Carry on.)
From Jericho we drove along the Dead Sea--which is huge, but evidently used to be much larger; I don't know if Micky said why it's receded so much, but he pointed to a marker on the rock on the right side of the car about 10 feet off the ground and he said that marked the water line at the beginning of the century. The water line was currently about half a mile to our left.
The ground near the Dead Sea is, well, dead. I don't mean like a desert, which is actually full of life. I mean, this was dead. Nothing living for a half mile or so from the water. It was like looking at the surface of the moon.
We arrived at Qumran, site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. There's a gift shop selling beauty products from the Dead Sea, including some reputed to be good for psoriasis. But I didn't buy any.
The attraction here starts with a short film (3 screens wide, so the fly-by scenes made me dizzy) of what life among the Essenes was like. A topic of discussion: was that crazy John the Baptist the same crazy John the Essenes had kicked out?
Then you move out to the dig/reconstruction of the Essene encampment, which is in the middle of this barren, godforsaken place. The entire thing was designed around saving as much water as possible from the flash flood runoff that came once or twice a year.
Basically: a bunch of religious fanatics living out in the desert and hoping the Messiah would show up. And fantasizing about how, when Jerusalem finally got purified, they were going to be the ones on top, running everything. Ha.
Qumran: I Essene this kind of thing before.
We checked into the hotel, the Grand Hyatt Dead Sea, which is one of the newest hotels in the resort area. The resort section, at the southern end of the Dead Sea, wouldn't even be next to the Dead Sea anymore (because of the serious recession of the waterline), except for a series of dams set up specifically to keep the southern section of the Dead Sea available to the resorts.
Darin and I got the wrong room at the start--again, two twin beds instead of a king. So I went downstairs to change it and Micky asked me what was wrong. I told him and he said, "Come with me!" He led me over to the desk and said, "This lady has the opposite problem. (quietly) I don't think she wants to sleep with her husband." (Turns out her sons had the king and wanted the twins.)
We had dinner at the hotel, because it was Shabbat and the tour company will handle our Shabbat dinners (everything shuts down, not that there's that much available in this little resort area). It was a big kosher buffet (just about every eating establishment we've come across is kosher).
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com