7th day (Kinneret Views)

When is a leg of the shvill like a one-night stand? When it's short, hot and fun.

It felt like a long time since we'd done a walk. It had been a long time since we'd done a walk. Over a month. Between international commitments, school holidays and just busy summer stuff we couldn't get it together. It will be another month before we get together again. We've been doing non shvil yisrael walks for a few years now and we always meet less in the summer. I guess its just the rhythm of the year and of course the fact that we have far less options. Many walks are just too hot or too long to do in the Israeli summer, no matter what time we start. (remember, 5.30 rise, 6.30 meet) Others may be in areas that might be a bit cooler but are just too beautiful in other seasons to "waste" in the summer. With this in mind we decided to skip forward a couple of legs, drive rather than walk the first couple of kilometres along the main road of Upper Tiberias (in Hebrew its Tiberias Elite, but believe me, there's nothing "elite" about this part of town), get going early and hope that we wouldn't get fried by the sun. Yoni parked his new car a bit down the track so as to hide it, hoping that it wouldn't get broken into and off we trotted. We got past the inhabited parts of Upper Tiberias pretty quickly but before we did we noticed how dirty the path was. In this part of the Middle East what doesn't actually belong to you, what isn't part of your property, is OK to pollute or deface. At different points along shvil yisrael there are maps that place your position relative to the vicinity with little "you are here" arrows and are covered in clear hard plastic to protect it from the environment. Well here, in the dirty empty lot where this map stood, the plastic may have protected it from the rain, sun and wind but not the environmental hazard known as Tiberians
After a few hundred metres we noticed two things that were central to today's proceedings. The first was stupidly obvious. We were about to do our Kinneret leg. When the elders of the tribe planned out the route of shvil yisrael there were a few landmarks that they just couldn't miss out on. You know, the top ten of attractions that Israel is famous for, the few obvious geographical landmarks that this tiny country holds. If we ignore the little fella that walked on water and split loaves in this area 2 millenia ago and his subsequent affect on world history, and that Tiberias is Judaism's 3rd holiest city, it's still a fact that Israel only has one lake. A puddle by anybody else's standards, but it's all we got. So the shvill planners couldn't really ignore it, could they? The shvil doesn't actually run along the rocky, polluted and over touristed beaches of the said lake but skirts it from above and the east. A good choice, I say. And so it was that today we would walk above the Kinneret, gradually dropping till we could almost but not quite take a dip in its dirty waters. If we really wanted to take a dip, the end of the route was at the Yardenit baptismal site, where the holy waters of the holy Kinneret pass into the top of the holy Jordan river and believers come from all over the world to be baptized. Hallelujah! Anyhow, from above, in any season, the views of the entire Kinneret with the Golan heights behind it were pretty breathtaking.
The other thing that we noticed that in the morning, before the sun got to 45 degrees above the horizon and the temperature 45 degrees above zero, there's a very refreshing cool breeze that blows and makes walking very pleasant. For the moment at least.
Every walk has its color, depending on the area and the season. Today we had 2 colors. Blue, or shades of, and yellow, mono-shade. Blue, the Kinneret and the haze. And the sky. Who was the genius who said that blue is a cool color as opposed to red which is hot? The blue of the sky was hot and threatening. When we started it was threatening more than hot. As time wore on, it wasn't a threat. It was hot.
As for yellow, that was the color of everything. There was a while when we were walking through a forest of sorts. A bit thin and straggly but a forest. It even has a name. The Swiss forest. I haven't had the joy of visiting Switzerland (Zurich airport doesn't count) but somehow I don't imagine their forests to consist of a few Australian gum trees and some dying pines. Once we passed the Swiss forest it was walking along the ridge, out in the open, surrounded by dry, yellow grass, all around. This may not sound like much fun when the summer sun is rising higher in the sky by the minute but for the most we had the breeze and the view and the company. And it really was quite enjoyable. This walk in the spring would of course be stunning but if we were to pack up shop between June and October then we'll need to be accompanied by our Filipino caregivers by the time we get to Eilat.
The entire route was along a good dirt track that Yoni's new 4*4 SUV could easily have handled, but that goes against all our principals and wouldn't be half the fun. Would it? Garry rightly suggested that we could have done it on mountain bike. It was almost entirely downhill and on a good track but we looked ridiculous enough as it was, 3 fat middle aged English speakers, t-shirts drenched with sweat, stumbling red faced out of the middle of no-where into relative civilization. If we'd added 3 mountain bikes to the scene then it would truly have been yet another scene that Seinfeld would have regretted not working into one of his scripts. As it was, not at all to our surprise we were the only ones on the trail. No-one else is foolish enough to go walking in this heat.
As we descended we walked past increasing numbers of fruit groves, mainly mangoes, olives and dates. At some point the path was meant to lead us directly into Moshava Kinneret but we somehow lost that path. We were on a different path that led us to a different part of the moshava. As time wore on it was getting hotter and the breeze was starting to disappear so we didn't really try to backtrack in order to find the exact path that was marked with the familiar blue, white and orange of the shvil. When I mention that time was progressing it was still only early, around 10 a.m. but the temperature would have been in the mid thirties already. We knew where we had to get to and the right path would have led us through the Kinneret cemetery. Those of us who grew up in a Zionist youth movement will immediately understand that this is not some morbid joke being played on us by the shvil-painter but this is the final resting place of many of the pioneers of the fledgling Labour-Zionist movement. At any rate, we've all been to the cemetery before, when we were young and full of the zeal of that same Labour-Zionist movement and when the temperature was climbing from mid to high thirties, prancing around the graves of A.D. Gordon and the poetess Rachel didn't have that same attraction that it had almost 30 years ago. Now if we're talking about old times here then our stroll through Kibbutz Kinneret led us well and truly down the nostalgia path. We passed a rectangular block of old old wooden row houses, all facing onto a central grass. The exact same pattern and design that we lived in when we were on Shnat-Machon on Kibbutz Yizrael more than 30 years ago. A time warp. Yoni and I reminisced about the old days. Outside one of these huts hung a Lubavitcher Moshiach flag with the too familiar crown in the middle. The time warp was broken by a sign of the times and A.D. Gordon was left turning in his grave back at the cemetery.
Nostalgia or not, getting to brunch in the air-conditioned comfort of the Ugatta coffee shop in Kibbutz Kinneret and replacing lost calories and liquids was at that point our number one priority