Our next group outing was to Ein Gedi Nature Reserve and the Dead Sea! We did a really short hike at Ein Gedi; I'd like to go back for a longer hike in the future (maybe not in the summer though). We saw some hyraxes (like a giant guinea pig) and ibexes (related to a goat but they look like African antelope), which is always exciting!
These ibexes are settlers of the Negev Desert.
In the desert, we'll take any water we can get! About 30 people crammed into this small pool to cool off!
Jeremy took a picture of a dragonfly. Gross!
The Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan beyond! So cool!
The Dead Sea is the lowest elevation of land area on earth; 1,388 ft. below sea level! That means it's also the lowest lake in the world. The surrounding desert has very little flora, though some plants can live for up to 50 years on centimeters of water, which normally comes as a flash flood every several years. It's incredible that very nearby there's a natural spring waterfall with flora and fauna!
Our next stop was the Dead Sea! Like I said, the elevation is over 1300 ft. below sea level. To put this into perspective, our guide told us to imagine you're standing at the bottom of the ocean looking up at the surface 1300 ft above you, that's how low the Dead Sea is! Jeremy thinks it makes more sense to say - imagine standing on the shore of the Dead Sea while 50 miles away, the surface of the Mediterranean sea is 1300 ft. above your head! It's amazing! Due to the low elevation, it's much hotter than sea level cities in Israel. It was about 100 degrees the day we went in June, but there was almost no humidity, so it didn't feel that bad at all. Also, the atmosphere is so thick here, its almost impossible to get a sunburn. The sea is 8.6 times saltier than the ocean and because of this, nothing can really live in the sea, except one kind of single-celled algae. The area has been used for thousands of years for its unique health properties. Also, the salinity allows us to be incredibly buoyant in the water!
This is an incredible natural wonder and one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life! It's so relaxing to float on the surface of the water without any effort. However, the salinity causes any cuts to really burn and just generally makes things sting, so most people don't stay in for too long. You definitely wouldn't want to dunk your head, because the salt would kill your eyes. It tastes terrible, kind of sulfury mixed with intense saltiness. Let's start with the videos, since it shows how buoyant we are in the water.
Left to right: Catherine, Lisa, Sylvia, Me, and Jeremy
We're so buoyant, I can put a lot of bodyweight on Jeremy and he won't sink!
Just relaxing in the Dead Sea!
Time to put on the famous Dead Sea mud, which makes your skin silky smooth! Can you see the message on Jeremy's belly?!
Left to right: Jeremy, Me, Sylvia, and Catherine
Sylvia and I are muddy buddies!
Um, I think Jeremy is attempting to eat the mud package. Not yummy!
After an awesome day of seeing new sites and making new memories, we relaxed in the heat with some cold beer and delicious hummus!
During our 5 week kibbutz program, we went on 4 day trips to cool sites in Israel. Our first trip was to Bet Guvrin National Park, which is about 7km from Kibbutz Gal-On. It's called "The Land of a Thousand Caves." Our fearless leader, Marty, acted as our guide and showed us around the park. The land surrounding Bet Guvrin also included Maresha, which is mentioned in the Tanakh, in Chronicles, and archaeological evidence shows that it was once a great metropolis. There are thousands of caves in Bet Guvrin, many still waiting to be excavated. Many archaeological finds have been uncovered here and important finds are in museums.
Jeremy sitting amongst ruins of an ancient amphitheater. Many different peoples inhabited the land here for thousands of years; The Hasmoneans during the Second Temple Period, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamluks.... I can't remember who originally built the amphitheater (design suggests Greeks or Romans), but generations of different people continued to use it and build around it.
I'm standing, photographing, where the crowd would've sat, which now has modern bleachers and they have live concerts and performances here.
Jeremy with some of the friends we made during our kibbutz program.
Inside one of the first caves we explored; the ceilings must've been 20 ft. high and there were numerous adjoining rooms! Can you imagine hand-digging out a cave of this size?! All along the walls we could see chisel marks from the ancient workers. At the top of the room are dovecotes - little holes where doves can nest. Doves/pigeons were an asset to the community, similar to the ancient settlements we saw in Turkey. The main benefit was dove/pigeon feces which was used mostly for fertilizer, which helped their olive tree orchards flourish. Archaeologists have found massive productions of olive oil in the region.
I'm standing on an ancient stairway, carved inside the caves. It's dark in here, so it's tough to get a good picture.
An ancient olive press, used in the production of olive oil. This is real, though the wood was added by the park to show how the press would've worked.
Once the olives were pressed, they were moved to smaller buckets where their oil was strained from the remnants. Jeremy is picking up the big log that would've been used as a counter weight for the straining mechanism.
We kind of look possessed in this picture, which I guess is fitting because we're now in a burial cave! There were tombs all along the walls of the cave, all the way up to the decorated chamber at it's head - most likely the burial place of someone very important. The art was fading badly, so the park re-colored it, to portray what it actually looked like.
Inside giant caves which would've been excellent to live in during ancient times - naturally air conditioned! There are original crusader markings on the walls. The caves have such good sound quality, that they currently have little concerts in them as well.
Our friend Malka, who has a beautiful singing voice, gave us a little show in the caves!
Marty also showed us the hillside where it is believed that David fought Goliath. Down the road from there, he took us to a monastery with a gorgeous garden and a gentleman there showed us their very old, beautiful church.
Several weeks later, we rode bikes from Kibbutz Gal-On to Bet Guvrin to participate in an archaeological dig!
Malka and I all peppy at 8am, before the bike ride!
Jeremy locking his bike under an olive tree. To the right of the tree, in the distance, you can see the arched entrance of an ancient crusader church, which is now just ruins.
You can't actually eat olives off of the tree, they have to be pickled to be edible. Silly Jeremy!
Heading down the rabbit hole to the excavation site.
Note about the following video: I didn't explain it very clearly while recording. I briefly videoed the top of a door entrance, which appears as a hole near the ground. We're not digging at actual ground level where people lived, we're working our way down through layers of dirt that filled the rooms.
The history is (generally, as I'm no historian), when Alexander the Great occupied the land, it was inhabited by Greeks. But, then Jews got control of the land again thanks to Judah Maccabee and his revolt, and later his peace treaty with Rome. The Jews told the Greeks to convert to Judaism or leave (I know a lot of people don't know Jews actually wanted converts around 100 BCE. If you're interested in what historically changed the Jewish attitude on conversion, I can tell you about what I've read in my history book). Anyway, so the Greeks decide to leave, but they wanted to make sure they destroyed everything first, so they didn't leave any goods or dwellings for the Jews. So, the Greeks threw all their junk (everything they're not taking with them) down into their cave-homes and set everything on fire. Now, as we're excavating the caves, we're sifting through this rubble, so it doesn't tell the clearest story about who lived there or what was done in a specific room - for example a kitchen vs. a bedroom.
The archaeologists told us that the largest piece of ancient writing in Israel was found in these caves. They actually only found 1/2 of a giant stone and the other 1/2 turned up on the black market, sold by a robber who got to these caves first. The complete piece is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In these caves, they also found coins with the face of Antiochus on them. The giant stone with writing on it outlines the severe tax code put forth by Antiochus. This type of archaeological evidence supports the story of the Maccabees in the Apocrypha and that the Maccabean revolt did actually occur during the time of Antiochus. The severe tax code also gives one of the motives for the revolt. Pretty exciting that we are exploring an area that was a metropolis during the time of the Hanukkah story! We also got to bring home some pottery shards that the archaeologists could never match to make a complete artifact. These pottery shards will forever be a part of our Hanukkah story!
While Jeremy was digging, he found a piece of pottery - a handle!
The rules were simple, one bucket you put "finds" into and the rest of the dirt and rocks go into a different bucket. "Finds" from one room stayed separate from "finds" found in another room, so archaeologists can attempt to piece together the history.
Here I am, gently digging a hole. You have to start somewhere!
How do we know this dig is legit and wasn't staged because we're naive tourists? Like how do we know they don't just rebury the shards every day like its some fake Disney dig to just bring in money?
Evidence #1 - The ground was very hard packed and mostly full of rocks. I don't think the ground had been dug in before.
Evidence #2 - There are thousands of caves that still haven't been excavated, they're getting tourists to pay them and do a lot of the work for them.
Evidence #3 - They seemed very serious about saving the finds in the right place and later they showed us some of their most major finds, which went to museums.
Conclusion - If it was staged, they put a lot of effort into it, we still enjoyed it, so who cares!
Jeremy found a bone! Most likely it was an animal bone, maybe left over from a meal.
I found a large piece of pottery. Maybe the hole was for ventilation in a pot, who knows?!
The top of the jug Jeremy is holding was one of the more impressive finds in this room.
Jeremy climbed up and looked into other unexcavated rooms. Notice the tool marks on the wall from when the rooms were carved.
After we filled up maybe 30 buckets with dirt, we made a human assembly line to pass the buckets up, out of the cave. Outside, in the sun, we sifted the dirt and found a lot more stuff. We had to be sure to keep the buckets organized from the room they came from.
EW! Is this spider corpse over 2,000 years old?!
In the sunlight, our group found the remains of an oil lamp - the large hole is where the oil would sit and is where the two largest pieces are broken apart. The small hole is where the wick would go. The smaller piece on the left is just cool because it has paint on it from over 2,000 years ago, which is a more rare find.
After we were done finding ancient treasures, they took us on a tour through an unexcavated cave! Since the cave was unexcavated, we would have to crawl through holes the size of car windows, through darkness only lit with some candle light. We were crawling underground for maybe 30 minutes. The guide jokingly said, "This really scares adults, so I want every 2 children to have 1 adult on either side of them, so the children can help the adults through." He also explained that he didn't want anyone entering if they had, "Bad knees, bad back, bad balance, bad luck, or bad breath." We found him pretty entertaining.
Crawling through the cave!
Sliding through a small hole, I'm laying on my back and used my arms to pull myself through.
Jeremy coming through the hole after me!
No problemo for Jeremy!
Now we get to drop down into a black abyss! Great!
Jeremy sliding through another really small hole!
What a fun day of pretending like we're Indiana Jones! After, we had to ride our bikes back to the kibbutz and it was really hot out. We decided to take a shortcut...
Our shortcut failed, but we could see the kibbutz in the distance on the other side of like 3 massive fields. Why not just cut right through them, with bikes?! What's even funnier - in the middle of these fields, a car drove up and they asked us how to get to Kibbutz Gal-On! Uh, can't you tell you just drove through a field in the middle of nowhere to ask 3 tourists with bicycles?! We have no idea!!!
Eventually we made our way back to the kibbutz and we really do think we shortened our trip by a little bit of mileage, but increased it with a lot of adventure!
Our reward for a long, hot day of bike riding and archaeological findings...
Here's Jeremy doing what he does best - sweating through shirts.
