The Cliffs of Insanity, Israeli Style: Day Two

One of the problems with staying in “remote”ish places without a vehicle is that food isn’t always accessible. We had a bit of that problem and for that reason alone, partly, we treated ourselves to an amazing lunch/dinner at a steak house on the way back from the beach to our hotel. We were sweaty from walking, salty from the ocean, and starving from all of the swimming. We actually kind of worked out a food system here where most days we ate one more expensive meal that we could really enjoy, and the others were hobbled together from supermarkets and what we could sneak out of the breakfast buffets of our hostels. We saved up our days worth of food money and blew it on one meal. I would highly recommend this type of travel eating so that you can actually try the restaurants that the places are known for. But eating is half the vacation for us.


Anyway, after a great meal we hustled back to our commune, showered, and literally ran to the bus stop to catch the last of the 3 busses that day to Rosh Hanikra. Rosh Hanikra is a town right on the border between Lebanon and Israel and has some of the most amazing natural phenomenon in Israel. The cliffs of Rosh Hanikra are chalk white. They are made of fossilized something or another and are quite stunning. At the base of the cliffs there are multiple grottoes that have been carved out by the sea for thousands of years. They have built a cable car (the world’s steepest) that takes you down to the base of the cliffs where you can then walk through tunnels displaying the grottoes in all their dankness. They were very impressive and I was glad that I didn’t kill myself last summer trying to make it to the blue grotto on Italy’s Capri island – these were much more elaborate.


After being promised that a bus would come by the site to pick us up in about 5 minutes, we starting walking what turned out to be a three mile “headstart” back to our hotel when it didn’t show. That’s one of the realities of traveling without a car. We walked passed banana field after banana field and only after a particular bizarre stare-down with a heavily bearded fella driving a tractor right by our hostel did we feel the ooks. We are just at the beginning of the slow season, so the whole place is pretty deserted and actually quite ooky. But mostly in a fun way.

Max and I finished the night with a West Wing we had on our computer, a can of Pringles, and a chocolate bar. Disgusting, I know.

We Burn Easily: Day Two

After vowing to wake up early and swim in the sea by our hostel, we slept in. But no worries, our first activity of the day was the Akhziv National Park Beach about ½ a mile down the road. Another thing on my list was to visit the rogue micronation of Akhzivland. In the 70’s a man by the name of Eli Avivi set up camp just north of the National Beach and declared the ½ square mile an independent nation from Israel based on, what else, love peace and harmony. I had read that he even stamped your passport upon entering his magic kingdom. But as we passed by Achzivland on the way to the beach, it looked absolutely creepyfied. Not “cool, let’s check out that creepy place that claims to be it’s own nation”, but “woa…we’d like to live to sea 27, let’s run passed the rusty iron gates that were stolen from the set of Return from Oz.” So we were there, but we didn’t go inside. That’s good enough for me.
 

We were sweaty mcsweaty when we got to the park but delighted to find it almost entirely empty. The park consists of castle ruins from the crusader period and an amazing beach with lots of sea plants and various creatures. The beach is a popular place for sea turtles to come on shore and lay their eggs during the night, but we missed sea turtle season by a few months.

The beach did not disappoint and we spent the better part of the morning and afternoon playing In our own private cove and laying under the shade provided by the generous national parks service of Israel. Our bright red sunburns the next day might lead you to believe that we forgot our heads and our sunscreen in our delight and played in the cove with reckless abandon, but I’m sure that’s not true...

While on the subject of losing one’s head, after we came out of the water for the first time Max looked at me and said “um, I did something dumb.” And sure enough, he pulled out his wallet with all of our cash and various important papers from the back pocket of his swimming suit. We both thought it was hilarious. We put coins and batteries and whatever else we could find on the items after spreading them onto a rock and let them dry in the sun. Max remarked just today about the “special quality” his wallet has taken on since being submerged.

Welcome to the Dharma Initiative: Day One

I’m aware that I have disappeared for a week and that I have left the Jordan trip in mid telling, but the reason for both is that we’ve been traveling around the northern part of Israel for a little while now. We’ll get back to Jordan later, but if I don’t blog about our trip now it probably won’t happen. (Or at least without as much gusto).

On Sunday, October 11th we woke up early(ish) and boarded a bus headed for what we hoped was the Jerusalem train station. It was, but since I had it in my mind that we were pretty much 30 minutes from everywhere, the one hour bus ride caused us to miss our train by 10 minutes. The next train wasn’t for two hours, but I finished up some homework in the station and Max read his book about Masons (nothing having to do with Robert Langdon). The train was fine, but the last leg was especially nice as we drove along the coast through Tel Aviv and Haifa in order to get to Nahariyya.

In Nahariyya we met two the nicest Israeli’s we’ve met so far. One of them figured out which bus we needed to take into our next and final destination of Akhziv (about 20 minutes north of Nahariyya) and fetched us from our restaurant close by to tell us when it was leaving. The next nicest-person-in-Israel that we met was actually boarding the bus with us and she talked to the driver for us before we got on. It was dark, we were sans map, and the place we were headed, the West Galilee or Akhziv Field School, was on the side of a pretty barren road – hard to find. This dear woman talked to the bus driver several times for us and came up from the back when it was near our stop and told us that it was time us to get off. Gem.

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Why wouldn't the power go out JUST in our building?

When Max picked me up last night from my English class (which is going great, by the by. I'll post about it later, but I have 10 students!) he informed me that the power had been out for almost 4 hours. That included our refrigerator chuck full of food. Not awesome.

He was pretty frazzled about the way it had ruined his afternoon plans, so we swung by the grocery store and picked up a box of little tea-light candles and a carton of Ice Cream. I said to Max, "When I was little and the power went out we played Clue". So we lit two platefulls of itty candles and set up Monopoly. We finished off the ice cream (I know, all of it. We didn't have a freezer, what were we supposed to do?) and Max beat me three times in a row.

Once I got over my rage of loosing so terribly, we realized that it was a pretty fun night.

*The power came on later that night. Not the end of the world like we'd originally thought. I was drafting my request to the office for reimbursement of our spoiled food. I didn't have to use it, but it's nice to know that I've got one in there if I need to unleash it in the future.

Happy Birthday Max - It rained just for you!

It my Max's 26th birthday and we woke up to rain in Jerusalem this morning. Rain! This is the best birthday present ever - for both of us.

Isn't that just like Max to offer you a drink on his birthday?

On a side note, I like him a lot.

"Internet People Are Real"

That's what Max lamented after we spent 45 minutes or so reading out loud through Amazon reviews of Dan Brown's new book The Lost Symbol. If you are as nerdy as we are and need something hilarious to distract you (fall down hilarious) and you've got the patience to sift through a gazillion egomaniacs, you should head over to Amazon.com sometime. It's a bit of found poetry in a way... If you read the follow up comments things get even better.

This review and ensuing comment board was especially entertaining. (They are supposed to be kids going to wizard school...)

**A Brief Disclaimer*** There are many good reviews and many good reviewers on Amazon.com. I like Amazon.com, I buy many of my books there. It's scary to step outside yourself and write a review of something for it to be published...especially if jerks like me are laughing at them across the world. But some of these reviewers are asking for it. The 6 point list of advice for Dan Brown followed by the equally snarky response comments? It's "Waiting for Guffman" and it doesn't even know it...but that's why it's Guffman...