Our second stay in Jerusalem was primarily a chance to enjoy the city without the need to do major sightseeing. That and it gave us an opportunity to make a.day trip down to the dead sea region. And Jerusalem is probably the best place in the country to spend Yom Kippur, which began the day after our arrival.
The reason for this is twofold. Yom Kippur is the Jewish day of atonement, meant to be twenty four hours of fasting and quiet contemplation of ones sins through the year. During this day, all Jewish institutions and businesses shut down. No one eats. No one shops. No one drives. The airports and all land borders are shut.
Jerusalem, being the Holy City, observes the holiday even more rigorously than elsewhere in Israel. However, East Jerusalem, with its almost entirely Muslim population, and the Christian portionsnof the old city, carry on as normal.
The streets of West Jerusalem on Yom Kippur are almost eerily quiet. The only other instance I can think of where I've experienced a large city being so silent was Mendoza, Argentina on New Year's day. However then the streets weren't just empty of cars, but even of people. In Jerusalem, once visits to the Synagogue were complete, the streets came alive with families out for walks, teenagers sitting having picnics in the middle of arterial roads and youg children blazing down the slope of the road in front of our apartment on their scooters or tricycles.
Meanwhile, in the Old City things were almost as busy as ever. We went and ate our only Jerusalem restaurant hummus (plus a plate of crunchy falafel) at Abu Shukri. It was closer to the hummus we make at home, with more lemon and more garlic. 35 shekels for both, which was a little steep, given that it was a small plate, but I guess that's what you get steps from the Via Dolorosa.
We made another visit to the Western Wall while in Jerusalem. This was on the day before Yom Kippur to do the Western Wall Tunnels tour. This takes visitors through the archaeological investigations beneath and beside the western wall. It was a pretty cool trip. We learned some history and got to see portions of the wall.that had been buried for 1200 years beneath a raised Mamluk city. The (newer, crusader era) drainage channel and cistern at the end were really cool!
I do wish the tour didn't stray into politics (e.g. the guide complaining that the waqf doesn't let non-Muslims pray on the temple mount, in comparison to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which lets anyone pray at the sites they manage. While this may technically be true, it's also true that non-Israeli Palestinian men can't get a travel permit to enter Israel to pray until they're fifty years old, and that it's illegal for women to pray at the Western Wall in a fashion that is too similar to the way in which orthodox Jewish men traditionally pray). And I wasn't so enthralled with the way it treated old-testament events that have no evidence outside of the scripture as true historical facts. But overall I enjoyed the experience, and would definitely recommend it for visitors to Jerusalem.
Outside the tunnels, the night before Yom Kippur was a very interesting time to be at the wall. It was very busy, and when we arrived a huge circle of men was dancing, arms linked, while an old grey haired and bearded man led them all in song. Despite the inconvenience of trying to organize things on a trip to Israel during the holiday season, there definitely were compensations, especially in Jerusalem.
While we'd spent plenty of time in the old city during our first visit, we spent still more this time around. It's not as spectacular and glittery as, say Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. Nor is it as wildly exotic as the Medina in Fes. But despite being a huge tourism site, it's still very much a living town. Step a few streets over from the busy Arab souq, or the stream of pilgrims on the Via Dolorosa, and you're in a quiet residential laneway. The Jewish quarter in particular is almost all residential. And though it's all very new (having been pretty much destroyed after 1948, then heavily damaged again in 1967) it was rebuilt (like all constructions in the whole city, new or old) with tan coloured Jerusalem sandstone. In another 50 or 70 years, it will be just another layer of history in a city that has a never-ending supply of it.
One of the most interesting times to visit the old city is an hour or two after sunset, when most of the tourists have gone home. You get shopkeepers closing up and/or walking home, many of whom seem just as happy as you are to have a conversation with no sales involved. And you see a stream of Jewish men heading towards the Wall for an evening prayer. And on one night we witnessed the oddly amazing sight of a tractor-like garbage truck climbing the stairs of one of the "ascents" (streets that climb up from the lower eastern edge to the higher western side of the old City) as it did its rounds for the evening.
On our final day in Jerusalem we actually left the city entirely, making a day-trip to the south. Our first destination was the hilltop fortress of Masada, towering 400m above the Dead Sea. It was here that the final holdouts among Jewish rebels fighting against incorporation into the Roman empire made their last stand in 73CE. After a long siege, when it became clear that the fortress would soon fall, the approximately 1000 defenders chose suicide over capture and slavery.
We'd hoped to walk up but, after discovering that the 07:00 bus is one of only a few in the country where seat reservations are possible and that a full complement of passengers had reserved seats, we had to wait for the 08:00 bus (further travel advice for those making this trip: while regional transit passes are a good value for day trips in Israel, you can't buy them with funds already loaded on your Rav Kav transit smart card. They must be purchased with cash or credit card).
This meant that we arrived at Masada at 09:30, after the walking trail to the top had been closed for the day due to the heat (even though it wasn't hot at all down at the bottom, and would be barely even slightly uncomfortable after the 45-60 minutes the climb would take). Since the only alternative was to spend $32 apiece on the cable car up, and since we had plenty of other potential activities for the day, we decided to just admire Masada from the bottom before catching another bus further south.
Ein Bokek is the only public beach left on the Israeli side of the dead sea. All the others have closed down in recent years because unstable ground and skinholes have made walking (ajbd certainly driving) anywhere near the shore of the Dead Sea very dangerous. The reason for these is that the Dead Sea's water level is dropping precipitously. Since we visited the Jordanian side in 2008, it has gone down over ten metres! This means that the water table beneath the ground near the shore has dropped as well, leaving big underground salt deposits to be dissolved away by fresh water streaming off the mountains whenever it rains. The vanishing of the sea is due to the fact that the major tributary of the sea is the Jordan River, from which approximately 90% of the water has been diverted for agricultural and industrial uses by the time it reaches the Dead Sea shores. Fascinatingly, a project is just about underway in Jordan to take water from the Red Sea, and use the 400m elevation difference to operate a hydroelectric plant. This will in turn provide electricity to run a desalination plant providing fresh water for the surrounding desert areas and, as a byproduct, hypersaline water that will be discharged into the (hypersaline) Dead Sea to halt its disappearance. There are potential problems with this (e.g. The different salt compositions of the Red and Dead Seas), and it's not as ideal as, say, simply not diverting all of the water out of the Jordan River would be, but it is a pretty clever solution to multiple problems all at once.
We had a quick, but fun time bobbing in the greasy feeling waters of the sea and plucking salt crystals off the bottom (you want to be very careful where you step when bathing in the dead sea, because even the smallest cut or scratch screams out as soon as the water hits it!)
Our final stop, as we headed back north, was Ein Gedi National Park. The park consists of two Wadis (river valleys), one of which, Wadi David, has a perennial stream running through it, complete with waterfalls. Rare indeed in the parched, baking climate of the Dead Sea depression.
We walked up the very busy main walkway to the falls. Sarah sat and enjoyed the shade while I climbed up out of the Wadi on the second most popular trail to the spring and archaeological site some 200m above. From there I headed back into the Upper Wadi and then down into the gorge that would eventually become the top of the falls whose base Sarah sat waiting at. It was super fun tramping. Lots of scrambling and climbing on bare rock faces in the super-tight confines of the gorge (wouldn't want to be anywhere near this place after a rain). I arrived at the end of the trail to find two surprised looking young park volunteers enjoyjng the shade and the view. At first they were mildly perturbed that I'd ignored a sign saying something like "do not pass this point after 13:00, you must exit the upper Wadi by 14:30 and leave the park by 16:00". As with the beaches, where 90% of the (almost entirely safe) water being signed "No swimming!" I was surprised and bemused at how risk-averse and dismissive of personal responsibility the authorities in charge of public places in Israel seem to be.
After the two women and I chatted a bit and it became clear that I wasn't entirely clueless and incompetent, and that I'd understood and was confident in my ability to obey the second and third points, if not the first one, they were happy enough, and we continued to enjoy the place together for a bit before I turned around and headed back (making sure I got back to Sarah just after 15:00, giving us heaps of time to make the fifteen monute walk back to the park entrance before closing, even with a refreshing shower under one of the waterfalls on the way!)
As we waited for the bus, we got the final treat of a group of ibex. All the way up the wadi there had been signs warning that Ibex could dislodge rocks when walking above and to wait until they'd moved on rather than walking beneath them. I'd kind of figured that this was a further example of over-caution on the part of park authorities, but no! We saw over thirty of them, led by a big horned male witb lots of females and youngsters following along right near the bus stop!
On arriving back in Jerusalem, we made one final food stop, this one for a Sabich. An Israeli speciality (probably moreso than falafel and shawarma, which are arguably more Arab food than Israeli), the Sabich sandwich is a delicious mix of fried eggplant and an egg hard boiled in a heady mix of spices (kind of like a Chinese tea egg), with all the usual salads and pickles. Ours came from one of the most renowned Sabicheries in the country and I reckon it was probably yummier than all but the very best falfel pitas.
Our night concluded with Machane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem's big food market. We spent an age at the Beer Bazaar trying to figure out which of their house beers to put in our six pack (I reckon the tripel was probably my personal winner), and searching out the sharpest deal on cheese and the very best pomegranates for the second course of our dinner (and our final meal in Jerusalem).
While we'd make one last stop in transit, this was really our final departure from Jerusalem. We'd spent almost a week in the city, and while we'd admittedly been taking a slow pace, we'd only just begun to scratch the surface of the place. We'd almost entirely missed its museums, and had barely left the city centre and inner suburbs. It's not as overtly spectacular as many other cities, but I think I'm at least beginning to understand why so many people love the place.
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