19th day (Mr Shvil Painter's Revenge)

 Just so you know, we're getting up now at 4.45 on friday morning just to do the shvil. Are we crazy, or what?

Starting  where we left off a few weeks previous (at Beit Hanaya, not David Cherny's back porch in Benyamina), we followed the ancient Roman aqueduct as far as the village of Jizr-el Zaker. This is a village with a seriously bad name and I don't mean hard to pronounce. It really does have that run-down wild-west look about it. Dirty, unkempt streets, graffiti on the walls and a general feeling of malaise. The only good thing about walking through Jizr-el Zaker is that after approximately 250 km, where we've walked from Dan, over mountains, past the Sea of Galilee and the lower Galilee, it leads to the beach. We've hit the Mediterranean.
The beaches along this stretch of the Mediterranean are often quite beautiful, but instead of having us arrive to the coast at some pristine uninhabited shore, Mr shvil painter had us stumble out of a dirty street onto a beach strewn with rubbish and dilapidated fishing equipment. Makes you wonder sometimes. The view was sort of a mirror image of Santorini, run-down rather than quaint, uninspiring rather than picturesque. Once we escaped the slightly depressing aura of Jizr-el Zaker the seascape improved. The pristine untouched sands that we had expected now opened up ahead of us. As we progressed southwards public beaches were well groomed and clean. The Roman aqueduct accompanied us along the coast making for an unusual yet interesting type of border for the beach. Around Caesaria, people have come to lounge on the beach for a while, setting up tents under the arches of the aqueduct. Very idyllic. Very Israeli
  Along the way we had some more slice-of-Israel shvil moments. Firstly, we bumped into a camera crew setting up to film  some scenes for a television series, or so they said. They'd constructed a large open tent where the cast and crew didn't do much besides enjoy themselves in the shade.  Not far afterwards the shvil was blocked by red police tape, crossed in a way that in no uncertain terms meant that we weren't meant to pass through. We passed through. This is, after-all, Israel.
After five or six kilometres of strolling along the beach we arrived to the Caesaria National Park. The ruins of this ancient Roman port have been painstakingly  preserved. Israel has so many important archaeological sites that it's no surprise that when the antiquities authorities want to make the effort the result is quite impressive. Whilst this particular site is quite an important one, I wonder whether the fact that the adjacent neighbourhood of Caesaria, which houses some of the most expensive and exclusive real estate in the country, including the private residence of the present prime minister of Israel, influenced the degree and care of the restoration?

Yoni, our tour organiser these past few legs, made an executive decision that from here we would drive to Hadera, about 8 km away. Given that the bipedal alternative included walking past the power plant, crossing the polluted  Nachal Hadera and passing through the backstreets of Olga and Hadera, the "cheat" word was not even mentioned such was the level of agreement. We weren't exactly sure why the route took us inland when after skirting the power plant we could have happily continued walking along the beach all the way to Tel Aviv. We assumed that there was a good reason that would become apparent once we started walking through the large Hadera forest. Huh. More fool us.
Given that we'd walked a bit already and as stated ad nauseum we can't let an empty picnic table in a forest stay empty, we sat down and had our herbal tea and croissants in the entrance to the Hadera forest. Perhaps this is the reason Mr. shvil painter took us 7 km inland? Unlikely.

Eventually we put the cups away and headed off through the eucalyptus forest that reminded us of our native Australia. We'd seen very few planted forests like this along the way. A few pine forests but no gum trees as we say back home. Unfortunately Mr shvil painter had other ideas. He marked the trail outside the forest, not through it. So there we were, walking in the blazing summer sun, alongside this leafy shaded forest, absolutely sure that at any moment a path was going to lead us in. In our younger days we had an expression for girls that led us on, never to let us, ahem, enjoy fully our relationships, a ....tease. This was the equivalent when your married and 50.
After toying with us for a long time Mr shvil painter decided to put us out of our misery and led the path away from the forest. We were still in the sun, we still didn't know why we weren't walking on the beach but at least the shaded Hadera forest was no longer tempting us. We were walking now through nondescript barren farmland, occasionally turning right or left, but with the distinct feeling that we were walking needlessly in circles.
 At this point I proposed the following theory. The night before Mr shvil painter had to paint this section he had a night out on the town. He woke up next morning with a whopping headache and decided that the best way to get around the headache was to smoke a joint or two. And thus he set out to paint the shvil. That might explain walking in the sun rather than shade and walking around in circles.
After arguing which way was North, East, South or West in order to ascertain if we were heading towards or away from the sea, we took a right hand turn that encouragingly headed us westward towards the Mediterranean. Not for the last time, Mr shvil painter would spring a surprise on us. 7 or so km from the beach Mr Shvil painter now had us climbing "paths" through sand dunes. Why? Beats me. The only thing that made us feel marginally better, or at least less screwed up, was this poor group of 4 bicyclists,  all about our age, pushing their bicycles through the same sand dunes. They seemed to have a leader, the one playing alpha dog, who claimed he knew where he was going.  Now if I was following someone who claimed he knew where he was going and thus knowingly caused me to push a bike through the sand dunes, I'd probably be sitting in jail on a count of justifiable homicide, or reduced mental capacity due to sunstroke.

Eventually the sand dunes levelled out and the path led us to the same north-south train track that goes from Haifa to Tel Aviv  that we walked alongside and passed under at Benyamina in the previous walk. Once again Mr shvil painter would have us pass under the tracks to get to the other side. The difference was that this time we weren't meant to walk under the track but crawl through a rabbit hole. Garry, who is shorter and markedly less rotund than Yoni and I might just have been able to crawl through. Me and Yoni? No chance. A 21 year old ex soldier with a rucksack on his back? Even less chance. Luckily or deliberately, there was no fence separating the tracks from the path so we just crossed the tracks, as I'm certain every other shviller who gets to this point does. Actually, crossing the railway tracks recalled memories of primary school road safety lessons...look to the left, look to the right, look to the left again. No trains, safe to cross.

Right, we thought. On to Nachal Alexander, a slow picturesque creek that would lead us back to the sea. Well, sort of right. The way to Nachal Alexander led along a dead straight, open path, next to the train tracks. Bad enough in itself, but Mr shvil painter had tons of loose hot sand shipped in to make walking along this path resemble boot camp at basic training when we were soldiers in the IDF. After trudging for what seemed hours through loose sand I spotted 30 metres above this path another path, along a proper walking track and in the shade of a forest. We hadn't seen it because it had been obscured by a sand dune that rose above the sand path we were walking on. From here my theory changed. Mr shvil painter wasn't stoned. oh no, he was perfectly lucid. He'd gone into the office of the shvil forefathers and had asked for a raise. When they refused him he decide to take his revenge out on us, the poor innocent shvillers. There can be no other logical reason to shlep us away from the beach, lead real walkers through the back lots of Givat Olga and Hadera, walk adjascent but not through Hadera forest, turn us left and right in circles so as to loose our bearings, march us up and down sand dunes and then to top it off have us trudge along an open sandy trail when a shaded leafy path was only 30 metres away. Pure evil spite, that's all there is to it..
Eventually we got to Nachal Alexander and walked a very pleasant 3 kilomtres to the sea. From there we took off our shoes and socks, paddled along the water's edge past Beit Yanai beach to Havazellet beach where we met Kim, and Garry' and Kim's daughter Lea for lunch. More than enough for one summer's day. Garry the sea farer had been waiting for this moment a year and a half, where he would finish a leg of shvil yisrael, strip off to his underpants and run into the sea. Yoni and I didn't need any convincing to follow suit.

18th day (Afternoon Activities)

Ok. This is going to be a hard one to explain away. But here goes.

When we finished the previous leg of the shvil we noticed a few things:

The area that we are walking through at the moment is not bad but unspectacular. Upon checking the next section that we are to walk it seemed that it was going to be even less spectacular.

 It's summer and it's hot.

We're a bit behind schedule. It's not that we have a tight schedule to keep to but even at our pedestrian pace we have set ourselves goals that we want to achieve by the end of our second year.

We've walked over 200 km so far.

 At the end of the previous walk, over hummus at Abu Ali's in Faradis,  I suggested that perhaps we check out the capabilities of that little button, so rarely pressed, in Yoni's SUV, 4*4, urban recreational vehicle. Here I was, the one who  mocked my friends and co-walkers for leaving a car in the middle of a leg so we could drive between kibbutz and hassidic agricultural village,  suggesting we drive an entire leg. Without batting an eye-lid. Without the slightest evidence that I was aware that there may be an element of self deluding hypocrisy. That driving the entire leg was more legitimate than merely cribbing a few unwanted kilometres. And you know what? I do think that driving an entire leg is a legitimate shvil experience, where-as driving those few unwanted kilometres is cheating. Yoni, Garry and Tracey were just as

incredulous at my logical gymnastics as a reader of this blog may be, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

One advantage of driving, other than expending less human energy and more fossil-fuel energy, is that we can start in the heat of the day without having to drink 5 litres of water and still feel like we're marooned in the Gobi Desert. So we met at 2 p.m. at the Aroma espresso bar just outside of Zichron Ya'akov and leisurely sipped our double macchiatos without having to rush to start and finish before being toasted by the summer sun.

In order to add to the already different tone to today's proceedings, Yuval, Yoni's second daughter, decided that she too wanted to have a shvil experience and see what her dad and his two old (geriatric?) friends get up to one Friday a month. Except today was a Tuesday. And we were driving rather than walking. Minute details.

By 2.30, or maybe 1/4 to 3, we set off, determined not to sweat any more than we had to. Yoni suggested that he turn the air conditioner off so we could at least get a slight feel of midsummer shvil, but he was quickly voted down. The aircon stayed on. We followed the shvil marker from the Waadi Mileck road at the Meir Shefiya junction into an ugly, white stony path. The track was wide enough and in good enough condition that Yoni didn't actually need to press the rusty 4*4 button but it seemed a little insulting that if we'd decided to drive a shvil yisrael track then the least we could do was to put the car into the appropriate mode. It became quickly apparent that driving was actually a good idea, since the area was, as we predicted, somewhere between boring and ugly. Nondescript.

In previous blogs I've made fun of people who choose to drive through areas rather than walk and experience nature first hand. Now having been in the passenger seat, I will continue to mock those same people. There's no doubt that seeing the surrounding area from the comfort of an air-conditioned padded seat is a totally and wholly less satisfying experience than walking. Yet in this heat and in these surroundings, the air-con did us just fine.

The surrounding area went from bad to worse. After a few kilomtres of driving we got the top of a giant quarry. An enormous, white gaping hole in the ground and Mr. shvil painter would have us walk through it, or so we thought. We couldn't find, however, the shvil marking. We were convinced that it had ended up crushed along with 10,000,000 tons of rock at the local gypsum factory. Yoni and I ventured out of the air conditioned comfort of the Nissan in order to cross the moonscape, searching for a rock with orange, white and blue paint strewn aside by the quarry monster. To no avail. So after 20 minutes of fruitless searching, Yoni backed the car up and thanks to Yuval's superior map reading skills, (superior to us three oldies was no great achievement) we found the missing marker about 300 metres behind. Now at this point Yoni's car started to earn its keep. Clearly this was a walking trail, not a driving track. There were many points that were just wide enough for the car to pass and a few points that weren't quite wide enough, but we passed anyway. Likewise there were a few points where the path dipped or was rutted in a way that the bottom of the car just passed over the ground. In places that the bottom of the car didn't pass over the top of the ground but along it, we passed anyway. I'm not sure that the Nissan design team really meant for cars like this to be taken as off road as this, I think they were more concerned on trying to make the car as comfortable as possible negotiating pot-holes in the supermarket parking lot. Still, we slowly plodded on until we got to a point where even if it had been an army Hummer we wouldn't have gotten through. Trouble is that at this point we couldn't reverse back the way we came and the path wasn't wide enough to do a three-point turn. To Yoni's credit (and I think enjoyment) he somehow managed an incremental 20-point turn. Eventually we got to a junction with a bitumen road and if cars could sigh it would have.

But the fun didn't end here. Yoni, who planned today's leg in a way that I'm sure that the shvil fore-fathers hadn't imagined, wasn't going to let us get off that easy. By the time we'd finished the driving the heat of the day was abating just enough for us to walk an easy 8 km between Zichron Ya'akov and Benyamina. An old Australian friend of ours who occasionally follows the blog, David Cherny, lives in the area and was invited to join us for our stroll. So off we set, from the car park of the Zichron Ya'akov ORT high school, this slightly strange group of Yoni, Garry and I, along with Yuval and David. It may not have been a long walk but there was a lot to do and see.

The path led us from the nondescript car park around the back of a nondescript school to the entrance of Gan Hanadiv which is not nondescript at all. It's a large park dedicated to the memory of the Baron de Rothschild who sponsored the setting up of Zichron Ya'akov back in the days when Dreyfus was in jail and Herzl was just a reporter for the Basel Bugle. Not since our very first section in the Nachal Snir Nature Reserve had we walked through an area that had a defined route through a man made park. At Snir we walked along platforms above the wetlands (until we left the platforms and got wet). Here it is a lovely landscaped garden, still very natural and unsculptured but along clearly made paths. Very different from the usual shvil yisrael or other nature society paths that are just thoroughfares cleared so you can walk through the natural area. Very nice, indeed.  Not far after we left Gan Hanadiv we came upon a very well preserved ruin (now how many of those are there in Israel?) that apparently was an estate in the second temple period. It was rebuilt in the Byzantine era, but if you really think I can tell the difference between which part was built when then you're reading the wrong blog. I wouldn't have a clue. It was interesting all the same, with a mikve, a wine press, rooms and all the other stuff that you'd expect to see from well preserved 2000 year old ruins. Being on a cliff top the view ranged from Haifa in the north, down the coast as far as the chimney stacks of Israel's principle power plant at Hadera in the south. Quite stunning. Since it was getting on to late afternoon the shadows were quite long, so sitting in the shade under the wall of the ruin just seemed to be the right thing to do, even though it had barely been an hour since we left the air-conditioning of Yoni's Nissan.

Eventually we dragged ourselves away from the ever-lengthening shadow and continued south along the cliff-top. We were walking over sharp ridged rock that resembled the rock-pools at Elwood beach (or possibly lots of other beaches that I don't know about). This suggested that whilst we were overlooking the coast from a height of about 200 metres, this may not have been the case a couple of million years ago. Please don't take this as scientific. I didn't check my information in the South Carmel Mountains Geological Gazette.

At one point in the not so far off distance below us, we saw my van, a white lonely vehicle in an exposed dusty carpark,  hopefully far enough away from the village of Jizzer-a-Zarka so that it would still be there, maybe even in one piece, when we got back to it.

As might be expected, if we were to get to my car below, then we'd have to go down the cliff to get there. The descent wasn't too difficult and was certainly very pretty, but 16 year old Yuval definitely found it a lot easier than us oldies, prancing down like a baby goat and waiting at the bottom impatiently for the old goats to arrive.

The route was pretty straight-forward. Once we hit the bottom we had to continue southwards, walking on a path next to the train tracks that go from Haifa to Tel Aviv,  via Benyamina. Unexceptional barring that we were walking along a path that passed through a wild fennel "forest". The times that we've actually noticed specific smells have been more often than not stench; Garbage, a corpse (animal, not human, as yet), manure. Today  it was the intoxicating fragrance of fennel, or aniseed. It wasn't a faint whiff, but a perfume and it made for 20 minutes of otherwise unremarkable walking very pleasant. Of course all good things must come to pass, and in this case it was the underpass beneath the train tracks next to Benyamina station that brought us back to our olfactory senses. In order to get to the other side we had to pass through a swampy, smelly creek. Israel in the summer has almost no natural standing water, especially under railway tracks, so you can imagine that this was one patch of water that we didn't want to get our feet wet in.

I don't know if it was the fennel fragrance or the eau de bog that went to his head, but  David, who lives in Benyamina, 100 metres from the shvil, offered us a cold drink, a slice or three of watermelon and a lift back to my van. We took him up on the offer. It was the appropriate ending to today's outing.