Beyond The Maple Tree

Almost one full year ago, we started our trip in Colombia where we did the Lost City Trek and met Ofri and Niv.  After spending several days with them there, they invited us to visit them in Israel if our journey led us here... and here we are!  

Of course, our stay here was awesome!  Ofri and Niv were so accommodating and nice.. they opened their 1 bedroom apartment to us, and as soon as we arrived, they made us feel completely welcome and at home.... Thanks again guys!

We spent our first few days relaxing and doing nothing but wander the cute shops around town.  Shopping here is really cute since there are so many different boutique-style stores and very few chains.  

On the weekend, Ofri and Niv took us for a walk along the coast.  We visited the harbour, the beaches, and ended up in Jaffa (the Southernmost and oldest part of Tel-Aviv).  In Jaffa, we had an amazing Arabic lunch and tried Niv's favourite dessert called Kanafe... yum!

When we first arrived in the Middle East and Israel, our brains were still stuck in the super-cheap-Asia mindset where paying an extra 2$/night for air conditioning seemed outrageous to us (even though it was 38deg outside)!  Returning to western-world prices gave our budget-mentality a huge shock, so we had been mostly eating cereal (or other relatively-inexpensive grocery store staples) since arriving in Jordan.  We were beginning to feel malnourished from our all-cereal-diet, so, since Ofri & Niv raved about how great the food is in Tel-Aviv, we forced ourselves to splurge and get over our uber-cheap Asian budget mindsets.  Thanks to all of the great restaurant tips they gave us, we discovered and indulged in some wonderful cuisine including some delicious salads, amazing breakfast places, some of the best breads/pastries... we also got to try Ofri's favourite breakfast dish called shakshouka.  The food here really was memorable and delicious... well worth the splurge! :)  

Luckily, we also happened to be here during their Memorial Day, and Independence Day.  Memorial day is a really important holiday in Israel where they commemorate all of their fallen soldiers and victims of terrorist acts.  The following next day, they celebrate their declaration of Independence in 1948.  We went out that night to join in the festivities... the coolest part was seeing all the kids chasing and shooting each other with cans of foam. 

We were also invited to a BBQ with Ofri's family.  We were warmly welcomed with open hands and enjoyed a delicious home-cooked meal with homemade lemonade from the lemon tree in the backyard.  Lucky for us, everyone there spoke to us in English (since our Hebrew is entirely non-existant). 

In the glorious time of the crusades, Acre became the principal crusader port in Palestine.  Being one of the oldest inhabited cities in the region, it also saw its host of conquerers: Roman, Ottoman, Muslim, etc..  The old city had a medieval feel with fortifications, a nice harbour, and really cute old street to stroll through.  

We also decided to visit the citadel and the tunnel that the crusaders built under the city so that they could easily access the port without going through the streets.... pretty cool.. going through the tunnels feels just like in the movies when they're trying to sneak out of the city to escape an attack! :)

If you thought you had a good stache after participating in Movember, think again!  On our way to Tel-Aviv, we stopped at a Druze Village.  The Druze religion is an offshoot of Islam that started a long time ago.  Overall, the village was pretty ordinary - asphalt roads, cement buildings... The people are what makes the village particular - the women and men wear dark blue outfits and a white head dress, and the men grow some of the most awesome moustaches!!

On our day trip around Haifa, we stopped at this Beit She'arim National Park to see it was all about.  What attracted us was the Necropolis... a bit morbid, yes.  As you follow the circuit, you notice all of the tombs carved into the rock... they're nice, but not particularly spectacular.  

On one of the days, Jen found a place near Tiberias, where we could learn to make chocolate!

After the 6-Day War in 1967, Israel conquered the part of Syria known as the Golan Heights.  There are even remnants of tanks still scattered alongside the road... to make sure people remember their history.  

We spent a few days driving through and checking out the sites in this region.  The drive was so scenic and a complete contrast to the dry, lifeless Negev Desert.  The land is very fertile and lush... perfect for growing food and making delicious wine!

Our first stop was the Church of the Beatitude.  This, supposedly, is the site where Jesus delivered the Sermon Of The Mount.  Now the site is a tourist attraction with a church and a nice view of the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a fresh-water lake...).

From here we went near the Northern tip of Israel and visited the Nimrod Fortress, named after a brave biblical hunter who, according to legend, "could sit on the summit and reach out his hand to take water from the Banias stream...".  

The fortress was built by the Muslim ruler, ElMalik El-Aziz Uthman (that is is short name... his long name takes a few lines, so we'll skip it), in the early 13th century.  Since it's location is of strategic importance, controlling the City of Banias and important road to Damascus, the fortress has passed hands back and forth between the Muslims and the Crusaders.  

We also decided to visit a small town called Amirim where everyone in the town is vegetarian.  As we slowed to turn the corner and proceed up the hill, an older hitch-hiking couple approached the car and got in the back.  They seemed really nice and it turned out that they were from Amirim, so we decided to give them a lift up the hill.  To thank us, they invited us in for tea.  They were really nice and had many interesting stories about Israel's history and their lives, so we stayed and chatted with them for a couple of hours before heading out to wander the town and see the view.  We were planning to try out one of the vegetarian restaurants in the area but it was closed and showed no signs of opening anytime soon... so we returned to our hotel in Tiberias.  

Just as we were about to leave the hotel for dinner, we heard the sudden sounds of missile sirens screaming out through the city.  It lasted for several minutes and we looked at each other wondering if we should be doing something.  We looked out the window and people didn't seem particularly alarmed... and the hotel seemed quiet as usual.  We just shrugged it off and figured they must just be testing the alarms.  As we went to find a restaurant, we noticed that everything was closed... restaurants, shopw, grocery stores, etc..  Odd since it wasn't late and it was Sunday, which, by the way, is actually considered a week-day in Israel (their weekends are Friday and Saturday).  Luckily, we managed to find one restaurant (just about to close) and managed to sneak in a take-out order.  We asked why everything was closed so early and learned that it was a holiday called Holocaust Day... ahhh... hence the missile sirens, as a symbolic gesture of remembrance.

To end off our tour of the north, we also wandered through the old town in Nazareth, and lastly, checked out two wineries for a tasting (Rimon and Dalton).  Rimon was the most interesting as their wines and ports are made from pomegranates instead of grapes.  Surprisingly, the pomegranate taste was really subtle, but the port was really good so we had a bottle :).  

We decided to rent a car and do a road-trip through Israel.  We started in the Southern beach town of Eilat, and made our way up to the Golan Heights in the North.  It sounds like a lot of driving, but Israel is only around 424km North to South and 114km between the widest East to West borders. 

The first part of our trip was through the Negev Desert, which encompasses most of South Israel.  We stopped in Mitzpe Ramon, a town overlooking the Ramon Crater.  Although referred to as a crater, the formation was not actually caused by a meteor impact or volcanic eruption.  The 500 meters deep, 40 km long and 10 km wide formation is a result of natural erosion.  

The area has several hiking trails, so we checked out a couple and got to see some unique formations like the Ammonite Wall (a wall with many ammonite fossils), and the Sawmill (an area where the rock formations look like a big pile of wooden planks).

One thing that we really wanted to do on this trip was to dive the Red Sea in Egypt.  Due to a travel advisory in the Sinai region of Egypt, we decided not to travel there but still booked a boat trip from Eilat, Israel.  We walked across the Israel/Egypt border to Taba, then went 500 meters to our boat that took us to a couple of dive sites off the coast of Egypt.. 

We dove two different sites: "Marsa Elmugabila" and "The Aquarium".  The Aquarium was the best one of the two as we saw the most fish, and even an Octopus :)  The pictures from these dives are more blue than our Bali dive pics because this time we used our new GoPro camera, and it doesn't have a flash to bring out the colours of the coral.

Here's a pic of the octopus…can you spot it? :)

After our two dives we also did a quick stop near a small fortress island to do some snorkelling.

While we were having lunch, one of the ship crew actually spotted a whale shark swimming by our boat!!  Dom grabbed GoPro, aimed it off the back of the boat, and hoped for the best.  Seeing a whale shark is a really rare occurrence in the area, so we were extremely lucky!!!

In the Lonely Planet, one of the highlights of Israel and Jordan is actually Hummus... we had our doubts at first, but after eating it more than 20 times... we are now convinced!!  Not all are created equal, but none of them were ever bad... even the stuff that they sell at the grocery store was good!  Our favourite was from a place called Hashem, in downtown Amman, where we went multiple times to have hummus, falafal, and fatteh.. yum!

The falafel was a bit more hit&miss, but the good ones were super addictive - definitely the best we've ever had!

Wadi Rum: Life with the Bedouins or Walt Disney of Jordan?
…this, sadly, is pretty much the impression we got from Wadi Rum. 

We had heard great things about experiencing a night with the Bedouins in Wadi Rum, so we were excited to go there.  Maybe we got unlucky with the company that we chose, maybe going there right after being wow-ed by Petra was a mistake, maybe hearing so much about it got our expectations too high.  We thought it'd be an authentic opportunity to live with the Bedouins in the desert and envisioned ourselves riding camels deep into the middle of nowhere desert, pitching tents in a real Bedouin village, and sitting around a fire experiencing their traditional way of life.  We did do part of this, but the experience was not as authentic as we had hoped.

We took a local bus to Wadi Rum and met up with a guide that our hotel had recommended.  He brought us to his office in town to explain our options and prices for the day.  The prices and options were considerably higher than we had been led to believe, but we decided to do the four hour jeep-tour of the major sites plus spend the night at their Bedouin desert camp.  The other options sounded touristy and too pricey for our budget.

We met our driver and headed to the desert with another couple.  The jeep-tour basically involved following a set of tracks to the major sites in the desert.  The scenery was really beautiful, but you could tell from the tracks and crowds, that this was a very cookie-cutter circuit.  And the driver didn't say much, so unfortunately we can't give much insight into what we saw, but... here are the pictures! :)

Our first stop was at a spring that comes out of a mountain, which they refer to as "Lawrence's Spring".  You can't really see the spring… just the plastic hose sticking out from a crack… but the view from the top was quite stunning :)

Wadi Rum is a desert, but it's more of a rock desert…  so one of the major attractions was... a sand dune! 

Not far from the dune we stopped at a canyon.. nice for cooling down, but greatly pales in comparison to the canyon in Petra!

Next stop: a cool rock formation that they call the "big arch"...

Along the way to the last attraction, we stopped at what "used to be Lawrence of Arabia's house"… uhm.. ok...!

And lastly, the rock formation they call the "little arch"...

Then our jeep followed the tracks to the Bedouin Camp… 5 semi-permanent tents, 1 big dinner tent, and fairly permanent toilet and kitchen buildings.  The Bedouin tribe... consisted of one guy assigned to cook us dinner there.  But at least he is a Bedouin (or so he claimed... but he also later admitted that everything he says is a lie).

Overall, the scenery was nice and we had fun.  But it did really feel like a cookie-cutter attraction rather than an authentic Bedouin experience.. we learned absolutely nothing about their history, culture, way of life.. etc.  Prior to arriving we considered spending extra nights at the Bedouin Camp, but there was nothing really there for us.. so we decided not to extend our stay continued on our way down to the border town, Aqaba. 

To finish off our stay, they crammed all 14 of us in (and on) this little truck so that they could take us all back to the main town in one trip.