Our Trip Down South

This last weekend, we went to the Arava, a valley that runs between Jordan and Israel from the Dead Sea down to the Red Sea. The valley is part of the Negev Desert, which in general is Israel’s Wild West. At times, I certainly felt that we weren’t even in Israel anymore. For starters, it’s very deserted in the Negev, as I guess most deserts are.

On the way to the Arava, we visited a Bedouin market in Beer Sheva, where Stevy was warned not to photograph or else risk having his camera broken. (He managed to sneak in a few shots, though.) He later wondered if the reason was because there were women in the market, most covered from head to toe.

In a corner section of the market, men — mostly Bedouin, some Jewish — sat playing backgammon and cards. Table after table was filled with men drinking mud coffee, playing games, and smoking cigarettes. (The younger men sat in cafe-like enclaves smoking hukkahs / water pipes). Zoe, Maayan and I were the only females in that part of the market, and I sensed that we’d broken some unspoken code by being there. A nice female shopkeeper warned Stevy more than once that we should be careful about the girls in the market. She never articulated what could happen to our curious 3- and 5-year-olds, but it was unnerving to be forewarned.

After Beer Sheva, we continued down past Dimona, where Israel’s non-existent nuclear reactor is. It’s surrounded by miles and miles of fence-off land with lots of warnings about not trespassing.

The sight we beheld as we crested the top of the mountains before entering the Arava was amazing. We drove, often alone for miles, unto our first destination, Kibbutz Lotan.

Kibbutz Lotan uses alternative building techniques to construct homes and public-use buildings. The kibbutz members give workshops on building techniques, and Stevy got to watch them in action for a while.

The homes there that used this mud-and-straw-homemade stucco were quite beautiful, decorated with glass and ceramic pieces. The girls enjoyed the donkeys roaming through a field of date-palm trees. (Lotan supports itself, in part, by growing dates.) When we were out in the fields, we were only about 200 meters from the Jordanian border. We probably could have walked right over. At night, we could see lights of a village rounding a slope of the Edom mountains in Jordan. The people of that village probably could have walked right over.

We had a flat tire when we woke up Friday morning, so we got the tire changed with the help of a man from the area around the Kinneret / Sea of Galilee. He was at the Kibbutz to learn alternative building principles. We headed off to have the hole fixed at a nearby kibbutz, where we learned that we really needed 2 new tires. The girls enjoyed visiting the camels and cows on the kibbutz. The camels enjoyed my hair.

With new tires on the rear of the car, we headed back north though the Negev to the Maktesh Rimon, “Israel’s Grand Canyon”. We had arranged to stay over Shabbat at the SPNI field school in Mizpe Rimon. The field school is one of several run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. (I’d like to visit the others, too.)

All day Saturday, we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves. We began to know what it would feel like to be the last people on earth. That’s the amazing thing that the desert can do to you.