We'd been blessed with a long winter and a late relatively cool spring , which led us to plan an overnight leg that would have us walk through proper desert for the first time at a time of year that may ordinarily be too hot. Our aim was to get to Arad before the enforced summer break .
But before that we had a small section to tie up to complete the sequence. A late afternoon 10 km walk between Meitar and Lahav being the missing piece in the puzzle. Of course we have a bigger piece of the puzzle to complete, in the Jerusalem Hills, but we'll get to that over our next few legs in June and July. Once we complete that we can say we have walked (and driven) from Dan to Arad and are ready to tackle the last, long, hard sections of the Negev to Eilat.
With the usual formalities of meeting, coffee and driving 3 hours just to get to the starting point behind us, we turned off road no. 60 opposite Meitar, looking for a safe place to park. We quickly found the shvil markers adjacent to the road but in strict keeping with our "no road walking" policy, kept driving until the road petered out. Thing is, the road didn't peter out. It continued for about 4 km as far as the settlement of Sansana. As I think I pointed out in the previous blog, this entire area skirts the most southern section of the occupied territories. Sansana looks like it should be on the other side of the security road, alongside the settlements of what we call in Israel, South Mt Hebron. We entered Sansana in order to ask the exact location where the shvil left the road and went into the forest and found a number of young religious families that had many children and the glint in their eyes of those that are fulfilling their Zionist dream. Good on them, I say. At least it's in Israel proper and no-one can claim (other than perhaps the Hammas) that it's disputed or belongs to some-one else. Just 3 km north there are settlements that can't lay stake to such a claim.
It didn't take us too long to find the path. We parked the car and drove off to the Joe Allon centre for Bedouin culture, next to kibbutz Lahav, where we'd spent the night with the Hochberg brothers a few months ago. This was our starting point for today's walk.
It was close to 5 p.m. already and the sting had gone out of the day's heat, which is what we wanted. How do I remember that it was 5 o'clock? Simple. Yoni had a conference call to make at 5 to a business associate in the U.S.A. So before we actually started walking Garry and I had to wander around in circles, aimlessly kicking the dirt, whilst the third member of the party solved the problems of marketing policy for Fred in Atlanta Georgia. The call was much shorter than the one we had to endure in Spolletto, Umbria, where Garry and I were sent to wander the streets for hours while he laid plans for world essence domination. I digress. We dropped down through a thin pine forest and looped back behind the rear gate of Lahav.
We wandered across the dry scrub, crossed a road that linked anonymous point A to anonymous point B and continued on through the scrub. I would be lying if I said that it was the most enthralling section of the shvil, but the late afternoon sun, the waning heat, the cool breeze and the yellow and green surrounding hills made for very enjoyable walking. Two landmarks brought us back to the Middle East. During the previous walk I made comment that the route took us as close as we get to the border fence and security road that marked Israel proper and the occupied territories. I stand corrected (or in this case, walk corrected). The path went within 10 metres of the high fence and security road that is bordered by a wide sand strip that shows if anyone has crossed. Even though it divides between what is theoretically two parts of one country, if it looks like an international border and behaves like an international border then maybe…let's not get too political here.
The second reminder that we were here in a part of the world that knows far too much bloodshed was a small memorial plaque, set into the ground where two people were murdered in 2004. We hurried on, partly concerned for our own safety, it being so close to the occupied territories and partly out of a sort of superstition, with a spooky feeling of not wanting to hang around were people had been murdered.
We made it back at the car barely 2 hours after we dropped it off opposite Sansana. We planned to start walking the next day at 5 a.m and be finished by 10.a.m. so as not to melt in the desert heat and this forced us to get organised today. To this end, Garry's car was parked in Arad at the end point and we went to the local Arad supermarket to buy produce for our sandwiches for the next day. With that out of the way, it was dinner time. We'd been recommended a pub called Muza as the coolest place in Arad and since we're cool characters, made a bee-line for it. And cool it is. The walls and ceiling are covered with scarves of hundreds of football teams from around the world, though not a single one from an Australian Rules football team. We'll have to remedy that. After driving, walking, driving, parking and shopping it was time to do some drinking. The place had a good range of international beers and that was the first thing we dealt with. It didn't take us too long to deal with food either. We didn't think we'd find anywhere normal in Arad, but with a friendly staff, cool ambience, good food and drink, Muza certainly far exceeded our meagre expectations.
By about 9 p.m. it was time to head up to Mt.Amasah. Here too, we didn't know what to expect. If Muza had exceeded our expectations, the shvillers guest room here left us under-whelmed, to say the least. We thought we'd hit rock bottom at Lahav, where there wasn't enough electricity to run the kettle and the heater at the same time. Here at Mt. Amasah there was plenty of electricity and even hot water, but the bathroom stunk of sewerage, so testing the hot water in the shower was not recommended. The tap in the sink didn't work and was held in place by a bucket wedged between the tap and the edge of the sink. If we'd had the energy and didn't have to get up so early the next day we might have actually cleaned the room, something that hasn't been done since Ben Gurion left politics and retired to Sde Boker. Instead, we made sandwiches for the next day, set our alarm clocks for 4.30 and went to bed. Garry and I stoically viewed the accommodations as a quaint shvil experience, not really minding where we spent a few hours between walks. Yoni's deafening silence suggested that he thought otherwise. There's a hotel in Arad and to Yoni's insistence, that's where we'll stay next time we're in the area.
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