Pictures And Words

Sorry I’ve been super slow again with letting y’all know what I’ve been up to, I mean I have been really slow!! Im now in Perth in Western Australia, before this I was in Thailand, and here I am writing about Israel!

Me and Lee went on a trip around Israel to see some of the main attractions. one of them was obviously the Dead Sea! It really is rather salty, and you all float down there.

So, after me and Lee left her friends house, who was living near Jerusalem in a desert! we got a lift down to the main road where we attempted to hitch a ride to the Dead Sea. Whilst waiting around I took to taking pictures of the cars that were speeding past us, these guys can be let off the hook for not picking us up because we wanted to go the other direction:)

Some more car shots, what I was doing was following the car with my camera and snapping away on with a slowish speed, hoping to get the nice blury background effect that you see so much with fomula 1 and other speedy sports. It worked nicely on some of them eh.

Around the same area as the cars is this scenery, desert like and dangerous looking. The buildings in the distance look like some kind of high rise appartments, but they look abandoned post apocolyptical style don’t they, like something from mad max or the head exploding manga, Fist of the North Star.

This is another of the amazing road signs you see all over Israel, there’s always some well known city to be pointed to, or other such amazing landmarks and things to see. This sign was just behind me as I was taking pictures of the speeding cars.

After failing to get a lift a bus came along! Going all the way to the Dead Sea, it was lovely and air conditioned, as outside the bus it was hotting up a treat. As we traveled on the bus we decended down and down, outside there were signs telling us that we were below sea level, by 300 meters, then 400 meters, eventually to about 420 meters below sea level, the lowest point on the surface of the earth, and because of this it was one of the hottest. Then as we leveled off I could see the sea, the Dead Sea.

We had booked to stay in the cheapest place we could find, so we walked up this big hill, in the blazing heat, and booked in. Whilst walking up the hill we saw many of these gazelles.

The place we booked in wasn’t so nice, we booked a double room but we ended up with a 2 bunkbed dorm room for both of us, we just kinda took what we were handed really, there wasnt many other people around. We met a couple of other people, a guy from California, and a girl, but I can’t remember where she was from.

So we quickly unloaded all our things in the room and set off to have a swim in the dead sea, walking all the way back down that hill, and then along this dusty road, past a lot of road works to a kind of resort area. The Dead Sea isn’t the most beautiful sea, there’s not typical beaches, more rocky inclines. The sea was very blue though, and incredibly warm!

Every rock that was on the shore line had been coated in salt from the ever decreasing dead sea, the sea was saturated in salt, so when the sun beats down and causes the sea to evaporate, salt comes out. There are a whole host of other magical minerals in the sea, but they happily remain in it, so the white you see in them photos is all salt! I took some home to lick at my leisure. So did Lee, she loves salt to an unhealthy degree (did i tell you that she once put salt on salami?).

This is both of us having a float! See! you really do float! nice eh! Its really hard not to float like this, you try and put your legs down so you can tread water and they come floating right back up. There is a common photo you can see of people reading a book floating in the dead sea, I saw many people doing it, I didn’t have a book, but you can see from my legs sticking up that its very easy to float in it. It also had a very oily texture, and when you looked into the water, it had that the turbulent effect you see when you add 2 liquids of different densities together, it did feel very nice on the skin, very smooth feeling on the fingers! And oh so incredibly salty if you got it in your mouth!

Salt glorious salt! The stuff was all over the place!

More salt! And Lee in some kind of salty heaven.

Here is a bit of interesting history of the Dead Sea, taken from Wikipedia:-

“Until the winter of 1978-1979, the Dead Sea was composed of two stratified layers of water that differed in temperature, density, age, and salinity. The topmost 35 metres (115 ft) or so of the Dead Sea had a salinity that ranged between 300 and 400 parts per thousand and a temperature that swung between 19 C (66°F) and 37 C (98°F). Underneath a zone of transition, the lowest level of the Dead Sea had waters of a consistent 22 C (72°F) temperature and complete saturation of sodium chloride (NaCl). Since the water near the bottom is saturated, the salt precipitates out of solution onto the sea floor.

Beginning in the 1960s water inflow to the Dead Sea from the Jordan River was reduced as a result of large-scale irrigation and generally low rainfall. By 1975 the upper water layer of the Dead Sea was saltier than the lower layer. Nevertheless, the upper layer remained suspended above the lower layer because its waters were warmer and thus less dense. When the upper layer finally cooled down so that its density was greater than the lower layer the waters of the Dead Sea mixed. For the first time in centuries the lake was a homogeneous body of water. Since then stratification (the separation of the water, back to layers of different saltyness) has begun to redevelop.”

So thats was my Dead Sea experience, we had a little walk around after it, but it was way too hot to be walking around, there were some other things to see, but we just didn’t make it, we couldn’t face the heat there. So we hung about near our room, watched the sun set, then went to sleep for an early rise in the morning to catch a bus to Eilat, or to hitch a ride, which ever came first!

We woke up early, but it was still crazy hot, we made our way down the road and started with the ole thumbin for a lift. After a short while we got a lift with a guy who took us to a junction further along the road so we could intercept busses from 2 different origins. The guy questioned me about what I was doing in life, why wasn’t I married yet and so on. I guess its common for 30 year old Israeli people to be married and settled down, he asked me what I was looking for with all the traveling, he was content to stay in the thin slither of a country that Israel is, and I thirst for a larger bite of the world, nothing wrong with either really. He spoke to Lee in Hebrew for the most part, leaving me alone to look at the barren landscape around the Dead Sea. It was a desert apart from the sea, but I guess to fish the Dead sea is just as much a desert to them as a real “sand” desert is to us. So the whole area is a very harsh place to live, still people were there, living it up in fancy airconditioned hotels, pickling themselves daily in the sea. After a while the buildings along side the Dead Sea turned from being hotels to being big industrial plants, sucking up the sea and separating the various minerals that are in it. I saw one such plant thats main goal was to remove the magnesium that was in the sea, there were huge piles of salt next to the plant, salt being an uneeded by product of the extraction, Lee wanted to stop for a snack, but we didn’t have time.

We got dropped off in the middle of nowhere, it was insanely hot and we waited in a bus shelter for a bus, after a very short wait there was a bus that took us all the way to Eilat, where we wanted to go. In Eilat we quickly raced around the mall, I wanted to get a nice diving mask ready for the Red Sea. We found one, then quickly raced to get a taxi to take us to the border, where we crossed swiftly, looking forward to getting to the Red Sea for a quick swim before the sun went down. We got to a taxi rank on the other side, which was Egypt! And we jumped in the nearest taxi, which proceded to wait for about 3 hours for other people, hmmm. Here we met a great guy from New Zeland called Dean, who since he was traveling alone, came along with us to the beach we wanted to go. We got there just as it was going dark.

Our destination was a place called Sinai, it is the home of mount Sinai, where the stone slab of 10 comandments supposedly first came into being, gifted to us from god, and where Moses kindly read them out, so all the illiterates had no excuse for not following them, we didn’t actually see mount Sinai, but we saw many mountains that probably looked the same. Sinai is a desert, there wasn’t much to walk around and see, the point is more to stay put and relax, so the heat was never a problem, and if it got too hot you can go for a swim in the Red Sea, which has some of the best views when it comes to snorkling. We would go for swims in the sea about 3 or 4 times a day, each time seeing different sea creatures, my best spots where a sea snake! And several Lion fish, both of these creatures were poisonous, so I kept well away! The sea was so clear, and so full of beautiful colourful fish, it was a joy to be there. It was however, a bit cold, I don’t know why this is, as its not a particulaly large sea, and its roasting hot on the land around it.

This is Lee braving the cold waters on a rough sea day, some days the sea was as still as a still lake! Some days it was quite wavey. And thats along the coast where we were staying, the beach huts cost about £1 a night and were simply a hut with a matress inside, nothing more, nothing less oh apart from a mosquito net with holes in it.

Thats the common area in the resort we were staying, and thats a photo across the sea, which is Saudi Arabia!

And thats a mountain behind where we were staying, probably much like Mount Sinai.

And thats it for this post, im sure if I would have wrote it sooner I would have remembered much more details and things, that’ll teach me to write it sooner!

I’ll get another post up super soon, the next one will be from the north of Israel!

I look forward to hearing your comments about this post.