Road Trip Photo Journal

On the first day of our wee road trip, we headed down by the dead sea to the famous Ein Gedi Nature Reserve to do a little hiking. We forwent the most popular trail for a longer one up a wadi, being told we would have to get our shoes wet to hike through the "river", which turns out was more like a stream.  

The walk up was a hoot as we spent an hour either hiking partway up the side of the valley admiring the views of the hills of the Negev, or deep in the wadi jumping from rock to rock up the stream and somehow managing to keep our sneakers dry. It was my trusty traveling skirt, I tell you. No movement hindered in that baby. 

The scene at the top was madness with about 150 tweens on some sort of school trip, eating lunches and taking a dip in the pool of the waterfall. It wasn't the tweens themselves that bothered me, it was the collection of their 150 excited voices confined by the canyon. 

We spent about two seconds admiring the waterfall before heading up to a section that the guy at the gate said "is beautiful and hardly no one goes there." The extra half hour hike in the blazing heat was worth it and we cooled off in the pools before heading back down again.  

There were lots of horned ibexes, scads of hyrax (some sort of ground hog thing), and lots of new birds for The Chicken to gape at. 

After a well deserved icecream, we made the 300 m trip down to the dead sea to dip our toes. It is a Muslim holiday and the place was packed with Palestinian vacationers going for a float in every possible level of dress. (Well except naked- but it sometimes can be difficult to tell with the large hairy men in the speedos!)

We hopped in the car and headed South towards Eilat. Near the end of the Dead Sea, surrounded by the Nevev desert, we saw SNOW!

 Ha Ha, just kidding. It was the mountain of salt from the Dead Sea Works where they harvest all the salts and minerals. 

In Eilat, we spent a couple of happy days scuba diving in the Red Sea. As you can imagine the colours and the fish and the corals were fabulous. The only thing not to like about scuba diving is that I can't ask any questions! But I for sure saw something called a trumpet fish and a spotted ray. As for the others, there were neon blue fish, zebra striped ones, blue and pink ones, blue ones with yellow fins, ... Poor James got "chased" by some mean coral and surfaced with a very impressive looking scrape on his forehead. 

As I mentioned before, we stayed at Arie's Awesome Guesthouse and Museum of Kitch, which can be found on Patio Antenna Lane.  And as you can imagine, the proprietor was just as eccentric as his guesthouse's name. But these are always the most fun places to stay, and we greatly enjoyed Arie's stories, sitting on his couch on his roof watching the sun go down and reading a couple of his many books (stored between the kitch, of course). 

When I headed up to the roof, I exclaimed "You have a couch up here! It must really never rain". Arie told us that he used to be a high school English teacher and that last year it rained in Eilat for the first time in years. His students went completely ape and he finally just sent the teens out to play in it. 

Some genius civil planner decided that Eilat should only have round-abouts, and so there isn't a single traffic light– except this one corner. Proving that going to university doesn't make you smart, as we drove up to the intersection, James said "What the F?" at the same time that I said "What does a BLUE light mean?" It took us an embarrassingly long moment to realize it was art. 

Then back home again, home again, jiggity jig. And another whole week of work to do.