46th day (Change In Plan)

Remember us? It's been a long time. For the first time in 3 years on the shvil we were forced to postpone a shvil leg due to the weather. Not unbearably hot desert weather but cold and wet March weather. And then along came Pesach and suddenly we've missed the winter walking season. Oh well. That's life.

 Rather than try to get down south on a Thursday, a work day, we decided to do a proper Friday and Saturday weekend on the shvil. It turned out to be a wise decision but it entailed getting up at 3.45 (yes, there is such a time on the clock. It just isn't meant for humans) meeting up and heading off from the north at 5.00. At least we arrived at Nafhah prison by 8.30. Nafhah prison has no special significance other than it is just north of Mitzpeh Ramon, is the place where we agreed to leave Yoni's car and meet up with Benad. He was our Jewish replacement for Sammi the Bedouin who proved to be somewhat  unreliable last time. We had high hopes for Benad. Hiring a 4WD vehicle and driver to drop you off and pick you up in the middle of no-where in the desert is an expensive business. Most people do it as a business and quote prices which allow for a very handsome profit. Benad, who himself walked the entire Shvil Yisrael, claims to do it to satisfy his desire to help other shvillers out.  I'm not convinced that this wasn't just a sales pitch, since he turned out to be not a lot cheaper than the professionals from the area. No matter. He arrived at the jail about 15 minutes after us. After the necessary introductions and other niceties we were off to the Hava campground. We'd finished the previous leg at a point on the oil route (shvil haneft) and technically should have started there, BUT, since that would have entailed walking for some 6 km along a dirt track with no notable landmarks other than a tunnel that was built to hold emergency supplies of oil that proved to be very leaky and a campground that goes by the imaginative name of "the thirsty snake", we skipped forward to the Hava campground.

By 10 a.m. we were looking for the trail markings above the Hava canyon, or perhaps the Eve canyon if I want to translate accurately. Hava or Eve, it is very pretty. We walked above a 30 metre deep gash in the earth that snakes through the desert above. After a kilometer or so the path steeply dropped into the canyon. We could have backtracked within the canyon in order to see the Hava waterholes but the prospect of seeing a series of small holes with a light covering of brackish water just didn't seem a big attraction. Other people who have seen them recommend visiting the waterholes. Oh well. Next time. The path continued for 3 or so km inside the canyon and made for very pleasant, "why did it take us so long to get back on the shvil?" walking. At some point the trail took a sharp right hand turn up a different, equally as steep sided canyon. Had we continued straight we would have gotten to the Hava\Eve springs which are apparently very nice but apparently not nice enough for the shvil elders to decide that we should go there. True, we have seen the Yorkam, Akev and Shaviv springs which are all very special, each in a different way, so I guess I can't complain about missing a desert spring. I can however complain about missing a cave. As we turned right we spotted a largish looking cave a few hundred metres straight ahead. Yoni and Garry had to almost physically restrain me from not rushing up to see it. The path had us turning right on our way to Matsad Machmal, today's planned end point and not to an unnamed cave that held little interest to anyone but me. Oh well. Next time.

The canyon twisted left and right, occasionally even continuing straight for a few hundred metres. Generally the path was easy to spot and just as easy to negotiate. At other points there was no clear path and we had to make our way forward by climbing, clawing or crawling over the terrain, each of us using whatever method we deemed appropriate. I'm being gentle here. One of us crawled more than the others, but for pride's sake, his name remains with the author.

The thing about walking through steep sided desert canyons is that eventually you have to get out of them. And it's rarely easy. A shvil marking was painted on a boulder adjacent to the canyon wall. Trouble is we couldn't see a path. Hmm. "This will be fun," I exclaimed. And indeed it was. Soon after the marking on the boulder we saw another one leading into a near vertical crevice that split the canyon wall. And another marking above that. At least Mr Shvil Marker was clear about his intent. About half way up he was kind enough to bolt some hand rungs into the wall, but we had to get to this about half way point to use them. Funnily enough, as formidable as the climb looked from the bottom, when looking down upon what we had just accomplished from the top, it looked even more difficult. "Did we really just climb that?" we asked ourselves. The view in front of us from the top, however, was not of vast awe inspiring expanses, as we might have hoped, but of a path that continued steeply upwards. We may have been out of the canyon but we hadn't finished the ascent. At least it was a walk and not a climb. Eventually the path led us to a flat mountain top that did indeed overlook a breathtaking vista. The perfect spot for a tea-and-chocolate-croissant break.

Throughout the morning Garry and I had been distracted by our inability to obtain information regarding one of the most important events on the world sporting calendar that was taking place as we walked. No, not the Monacco Grand Prix. Nor Flushing Meadows. Barcelona hadn't lost yet to Chelsea in the European Champion's League. St.Kilda, our beloved and perennial loser AFL team was playing Fremantle, a team that we'd had no firm opinion about until they poached our coach at the end of the previous season. And we couldn't get 3G range anywhere here in the desert. I will have to write a formal letter of complaint to the government Department of Communications and the cellular phone companies about their lack of range in the desert. Where are their priorities, I ask? At least here, on top of this mountain, we had cellphone range. I rang my son Gal who was listening to the commentary on the radio via the internet. I shouldn't have made the effort. We lost.

It wasn't particularly late and we didn't have a long way to get to Matsad Machmal, but we didn't wait at our tea stop for too long. We headed off the plateau along a saddle between two peaks. Suddenly, in the distance, we spotted two figures walking in our direction. Lo and behold…shvillers. We haven't seen other shvillers for at least 6 months, perhaps longer. Benad assured us that this was the season and that there had been swarms of walkers passing thorough this area over the past 2 months. "Swarms" is the exact word that he'd used. We most certainly hadn't encountered swarms, but we were excited all the same to meet even a single pair of shvillers. As it happened, they would change the entire weekend for us. They were a pretty "standard" shvil yisrael pair (If there is such a thing as standard, given that we hadn't seen a sole for over 6 months); a young Israeli boy and girl, probably just out of the army, carrying their entire worldly possessions on their backs.  The girl looked especially tough and fit, as if she was a fitness instructor in a top battle unit. To prove she was extra tough and fit, she was walking the shvil in socks and sandals, not the usual walking shoes. Naturally, we exchanged niceties, informing them that they were the first shvillers that we'd seen for a long long time. We also informed them that we were heading for Matsad Machmal, intending to walk from there to Mitzpeh Ramon the following day. They looked puzzled. Matsad Machmal was only a few kilometres ahead and it was still relatively early. "Why not continue on to Mitzpeh Ramon," they asked. "You can easily make it there today". They were, of course, correct. Sometimes you get into a mindset and  become blinkered by your pre-existing plan. We were walking as far as Matsad  Machmal today and that was it. It was 27 kilometres from where we'd started the day to Mitzpeh Ramon. In our minds, that's just too far for us to do in one day. But in reality, we can do it. It's a matter of putting your mind to it. Had these shvillers not suggested the obvious to us, we wouldn't have thought to continue. Of course we also would not have been able to continue onwards from Mitzpeh Ramon the next day. Instead, Benad would have dropped us back at Matsad Machmal and we would have walked into Mitzpeh Ramon. In a flash, we had just added 17 kilometres on to our day's walk. What, are we mad?

 

Sure enough, after an easy few kilometres and another pair of shvillers, we arrived at the turnoff to Matsad Machmal. Matsad Machmal is another ancient Roman fort, strategically placed above the Ramon crater in order to protect the interests of the Empire, all those years ago. Now that we had another 17 kilometres to cover, we didn't take the short detour to see the fort, but continued onwards.

You can tell that we're starting to think about the end of the shvil. We have about 300 km left, of which 40 or so go next to the no. 40 road and will be driven. 260 walked km is about 14 more walking days. Or, as I asked my 2 friends who are more mathematically astute than me, "by the time we get to Eilat, how many steps will we have taken?"  Using a complicated logarithm of average step length, a quotient for additional short steps whilst climbing or descending, adding in extra steps for unplanned, superfluous or lost metres and subtracting parts that we have or will drive or skip, we got to the rough figure of 1.6 million steps. Impressive, no? We're not in Eilat yet, but we're certainly thinking about it.

Besides the plain logic of walking for half a day rather than wasting that same time hanging around Mitzpeh Ramon, the walk was excruciatingly boring. Had we returned the following day just to do this, we would have been spectacularly pissed off. We had other things that would spectacularly piss us off the next day, but more of that in the next chapter. We thought that the walk into Mitzpeh Ramon was along the crater rim the entire way. So we thought. After an hour and a half's walking along a wide dirt track through an area that can only be described as absolutely nondescript, we arrived to the edge of Machtesh Ramon. As with the previous two machteshim that we had encountered, the views from the top are simply breathtaking. This crater, however, is far bigger than the other two (Hamchtesh Hakatan {the small crater} and Hamachtesh Hagadol {the Big Crater}) so the views are even grander, if that is at all possible. Nature as a work of art. After stopping to breathe in the view, we continued on. The path once again took us away from the crater's edge, along yet more nondescript landscapes. It did return once again to the crater's edge, but this really wasn't the sort of walking that justified adding 17km on to our day. As soon as we had cell range we rang good old Benad and asked him to come and pick us up at 5 o'clock. Enough is enough. He may be of the Jewish nation but his understanding of time was straight out of the Bedouin handbook. 6 o'clock rolled up as he did, with a nonchalant apology that he mistimed his own day out. At this point Sammi the Bedouin suddenly wasn't such a bad option.

The further south we get the more frontier the towns get. Way back in Arad, there was a good, normal pub. In Dimona, a guest house with a Jacuzzi.  If Yeruham  had a feeling of the middle of no-where, then Mitzpeh Ramon is the outer extremities of no-where. Firstly you can't help but notice the potential of the place, sitting on the lip of the Machtesh Ramon. The possibilities for eco-tourism are endless. Instead there are a couple of world class hotels, a few more run-down ones, no restaurants or even a coffee shop open on a Friday night and one miniscule mini-market open for supplies once the sun goes down. The place has an air of sadness. Our accommodation, Tzimmer B'shchuna  or Orna's place, was in keeping with the malaise of the town. It was clean, basic and answered to all our needs. It even had satellite TV that broadcast some of the world's leading stations, like ImamTV from Iran alongside numerous Afghani, Pakistani, Bahraini and Saudi options. I was shocked to see Arab porn tv, with names like Arab xxx, Arab babes and the likes, where Salima was waiting for your call. I could have tuned in to Bosnia Today, but if I'd wanted Israel 1, 2 or 10, then I would have had to find other accommodation.

Luckily the only store open within 150km, Kol-bo Slomon, was just across the road from the apartment. This retail giant of the Negev was about the size of a standard bathroom in an average western home. Other than yesterday's bread rolls, there was nothing there that hadn't come off the production line before the beginning of last month. "Fresh" was a dirty word. No matter. There was enough stuff to supply us for a good breakfast the next day and at least we were safe in the thought that everything that we'd bought had enough preservatives in it to prevent spoilage until we ate it.

And then there was dinner. We had the option of Chez Eugene, a very classy French restaurant at the newly opened 5 star hotel. There was a restaurant in another hotel where Garry had stayed when he was in Mitzpeh Ramon not too long ago that he liked very much. Unfortunately it was booked out and no amount of pleading could get us in. So we settled for the Hotel Club Ramon, where for the sum of 100 NIS each we got food that kibbutznikim have been eating in their dining rooms these past 100 years. The chef even whipped up for Garry a vegetarian delight, comprising of yesterday's mashed potatoes crumbed, battered and fried into a giant patty. Good thing we had that old reliable bottle of Grey Goose back in the apartment to calm the spirits. I'm running out of the good vodka and think that next time we hit the trail we may try an alternative to this version of Mitzpeh Ramon.

We were "sleeping in" till 4.30 tomorrow, so after 24 km of walking, the gourmet dining and the post dinner vodka, snoring by 10 p.m. seemed a better alternative to watching the edited highlights of the Koran on television.