44th day (Mysterious Messages in the Desert)

You have days like this. Short, nothing legs that link one interesting place to another. It would have been just as good if Captain Kirk had spoken into his wrist and said "beam me 13 km along the shvil, Scotty". But this would not do for the shvil elders, so we found ourselves looking north from the Akev campground, heading to the Nachal Mador campground, through the Zin valley, or as the Bible calls it, the Zin wilderness. This area is so out of the way that biblical scholars are not even certain that this particular valley is actually the Zin wilderness. Wikipedia gives it 2 lines and a photo. We gave it 4 hours, which is 4 hours more than anybody else gave it today. Once again, no shvillers, no hikers, no nothing. Are we that obnoxious that a nationwide warning goes out before we hit the trail? Anyway, I don't wish to be misunderstood here. An easy walk through the desert on a pleasant winter's day with 3 old school friends beats most other activities that I can think of, especially work. 

The Zin valley is a very wide plain surrounded by high jutting hills. It's pretty enough, certainly not ugly, but after the past few sections that we'd done, which have all been spectacular, there was no "wow" factor. The only thing of note on today's walk was entirely man made. A couple of hours after setting off we came upon a spot where hundreds of little messages had been spelled out using small brown stones. Some were in English, some Hebrew and a few in an unrecognized language which I suspect as Portuguese. There was the usual "Dianne 4 Fredricco" and "Maccabi Haifa Champions". There was a message concerning Hanukkah 2010 and one angry stone setter had even left "Fuck Ivan" for posterity. There were stones that had been arranged into dates, but not all the dates were the same. I guess as others have passed by they've added their own little submission to the field of rocks. The net result is quite a strange, impressive and surprising site that may keep extra-terrestrials that land here guessing as to its meaning.

Other than that, a few ups and downs, a few nice rock formations and we arrived at the designated meeting point, where Sammy our Bedouin 4*4 taxi driver had agreed to meet us. We learnt from our previous leg that an agreed hour is at best a recommendation for Sammy the  Beduoin, who has a different view of time to us living in the modern western world. I had spoken to him on the previous day and he had agreed to pick us up and seemed to understand where we wanted that to be, but when I had tried to confirm the pick-up, his cell phone had been turned off all day. Of course it is logical that he was somewhere in the desert, out of cell range, but I would have been calmer had I been able to speak to him during the day. As it turned out, we got in contact with him just as we arrived to the Nachal Mador camp ground and 15 minutes later he was there.

Yoni's car was parked about 15 minutes away from Midreshet Ben Gurion, where we were staying the night. He likes to get out and about with us, otherwise that little 4*4 knob on the dashboard would sit there, neglected and rusted from lack of use. But here, in the middle of the rough dirt tracks leading to the outback, was a 300 metre length of bitumen. It occurred to us that were driving along David Ben Gurion's personal airstrip. He lived at Sdeh Boker, which is adjacent to the Midrasha that has taken his name. It was obviously built so he could travel to Jerusalem when he was Prime Minister back in the 40's, 50's and 60's.Ben-Gurion's airstrip

 Midreshet Ben-Gurion is a small community settlement of 900 people. If we wanted to eat there, the choice was Domino's Pizza or the dining room of the field school where we were staying. Neither seemed particularly appetizing, so Yerucham, where we stayed last time, which was 15 minutes away,  seemed liked the best choice. The Abu Yerucham oriental restaurant there seemed a much better deal. The highlight of the evening, however, was the grand opening of the pub back at Midreshet Ben Gurion. When you know that your client base is going to be around 300 adults, you're not going to be spending a fortune in getting the place going. With furnishing and decor that may be best described as op-shop chic, and clientele that looked as if they'd just gotten out of a time capsule from Woodstock, It didn't look too promising. When Yoni and Garry asked for something as complicated as red wine and the boss had to send his son to the general store that was about to close to get a bottle, it was starting to look like a disaster. But as more people floated in the atmosphere warmed up and you certainly could mark it up as another shvil experience.
Back in the luxury of our youth hostel room, the vodka nightcap that has become a regularity sent us off to dreamland.