17th April
Jericho.
The 45-minute drive down into the Jordan Valley from the hills of Jerusalem takes you from mountainous to desert landscapes, and brings a typical rise in temperature of around 10 degrees Celsius. In winter this makes it a great place for a day out in order to escape the cold weather, but even by this time of year it means the Jordan Valley is bordering on uncomfortably hot. It also takes you to the lowest point on Earth, the Dead Sea.
It is inconceivable to spend a year in Palestine and not float in the Dead Sea, so I decided this would be the time. The strange, no, surreal, experience of the Dead Sea begins when you spot the many elderly and often overweight women rubbing mud on each other. When one thinks of ladies mud wrestling, this is not the image that might come to mind.
At first, I felt confident that I would not be seen in such a condition, but as the evidence below shows, the urge to get involved proved too much. But first, one must float, and in the ultra-salty water of the Dead Sea, once you’re in you do not have any difficulty in achieving this. In fact, the mineral content of the water in this lowest of seas is so high that the water is actually 33% solid matter. The classic pose is one with newspaper, so I happily obliged.
On leaving the water, the done thing seems to be covering oneself with mud. It did feel nice, but once it began to dry the heat of the sun became uncomfortably hot so I quickly showered off then enjoyed an ice cream in the bar.
As we arrived in Jericho, the thermometer on the car was reading 39 degrees and I began to wonder what this place must be like in the heat of summer. We took the cable car (reassuringly, this is Swiss made) to half way up Mount Temptation - here it is claimed the devil tried to tempt Christ after his 40 days in the desert - where we viewed the monastery built there in the 12th century. I would imagine that even nowadays a building project in such a location would provide considerable challenges; quite how this was built at the time is amazing. The monastery can faintly be seen directly to the left of the cable cars in the following image.
We then spent an hour or so enjoying the fine views over the valley from the terrace of the coffee shop, chatting with some men from Jenin who were taking time out from their course at the national police training centre in Jericho, before descending to visit some of the oldest parts of this most ancient of cities - the original parts of Jericho mark the earliest civilisation in the world. After dropping off our two new friends at the police training centre, we went into the centre of Jericho to have a spot of lunch – Falafel of course for my vegetarian visitor – before relaxing in a coffee shop, picking up some characteristically small Jericho bananas and heading back up to Jerusalem.
