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.
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