47th day (Further Than Expected)

Benad was ready and waiting at 5 a.m., leading Yoni and his car to the end point, then returning him to us so we could walk out of Mitzpeh Ramon. Today's leg was an unexpected bonus. Yesterday's extra, unplanned 15 km on the shvil allowed us today to do a leg that we hadn't anticipated. We had planned to get as far as Mitzpeh Ramon this walking season and now we would get some 15 km further south. That's good.

 You can always tell when Yoni is unhappy. He has the look. He got out of Benad's car and was glowing the look. I think his exact words were "We're fucked". The car was parked miles away from the end point and we were going to have to add on 2 hours of walking just to get to it. Benad truly had Yoni's best interests in mind. Had the car been parked at our finishing point, there was a good chance that it wouldn't be waiting there when we got there. One of Sammi the Bedouin's cousins would have dismantled it prior to our arrival, selling the parts to a Tel Aviv mechanic.  Instead, Benad had Yoni park at a place that was secure but not anywhere near where we wanted to be. There was nothing that we could do about that now.

We asked Benad to drop us at the Mitzpeh Ramon field school, where we would start the day's walk by dropping down the cliff, so to speak, into the Ramon Crater. Garry was very specific. The field school. The field school happened to be at the other end of the Mitzpeh Ramon promenade, about a kilometer and a half from where we were. By the time we tried to say something, we were out of the car, Benad had received full payment and was last seen heading north into the horizon.  Less than 24 hours previously we had high hopes for Benad. Now we had some serious doubts.

 The walk along the promenade at sunrise, overlooking the entire crater, is a sight so stunning that I don't have the ability to describe it. I've used up my stash of superlatives describing previous places. Here, I was just speechless. Maybe not exactly speechless… we could all be heard muttering "fucking amazing" like morons who don't have the vocabulary to properly express themselves. But yet the drop down the cliff into the crater is no less stunning. I didn't need to walk 1.5 km further than expected. In his defense, upon comparing maps and book descriptions and checking with Sol, my shvil authority, when Benad walked the shvil, the day's route started from where he threw us out of his car. Since then, the shvil elders decided, for reasons that remain secret to them, to add about 4 km onto the day's proceedings. Still, Garry was very clear that we wanted to be let out at the field school and not where Benad thought he should let us out. It appears that people, Jewish, Bedouin or Sinhalese Buddhist, who drive shvillers around for money, do pretty much what they want and not always what those that are paying them want. Perhaps it’s a case of "I've got you by the short and curlys and you have no choice". Trouble is, they're right.

The drop down into the crater wasn't actually too steep. We've done far worse and were about to do a real bad one a bit later in the day. Once we hit the crater bottom we headed east inside Nachal Ramon. Nachal Ramon is not particularly wide, nor is it very deep. The walking was easy and uneventful. Walking along the bottom of a large desert crater, surrounded by high rock walls all around, is enough. We didn't need for the walking to be eventful. Truth be said, I was a little bored, despite the beautiful area. Garry, on the other hand, kept muttering under his breath "gee this is beautiful", over and over again. I think he liked it. And so we continued on, not a care in the world, ambling through the desert. The Ramon Crater is a bit different to the areas that we had seen these past 100 km or so. There is far more vegetation. It's even green. And there are far more birds as well. It resembled a scene from one of those old Wild West movies. All we needed were some Cowboys and Indians, tumbleweed blowing gently across the plain and John Wayne riding into the sunrise. It just had that sort of feel to it.

After an hour and a half's walking in the nachal, the path took a turn to the left. That is, to the north. That is, back toward Mitzpeh Ramon. That is, away from the southerly direction that we were meant to be walking. For once, it wasn't a case of us taking the wrong path. It was simply a case of the shvil elders wantonly and unnecessarily adding on kilometres . The path we were on, marked both blue and white and shvil white, blue and orange, would meet up with a blue path that drops down from Mitzpeh Ramon. We could have taken this path directly from Mitzpeh Ramon, where Benad had dropped us off in the morning, rather than do a large loop in order to get to the same point. But no…there's only so much leading us around in circles we're going to allow the Shvil Elders and their man in the field, Mr Shvil Painter. The map seemed pretty clear that if we continue east inside Nachal Ramon rather than follow the shvil yisrael signs north, we will meet the shvil again a few kilometres further along after it finishes heading  north and does a U-turn south. We simply cut off the loop. This act of deliberately leaving the marked shvil signs in order to cut out a 2 kilometre loop was a potentially risky one. If we miss the meeting point we would continue east and not take the shvil path south. Our track history for finding and following shvil signs is not encouraging, but hey, you gotta live life on the edge. As it happened, all went to plan and we successfully found the shvil markings at the point we thought we would.

So now we were walking south in a different creek bed. The north-south view was only marginally more interesting than the east-west. That is, I was still a bit bored and Garry and Yoni remained over-awed by the beauty. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.  The path left the creek bed and evolved into a good dirt track, one that a regular car could probably negotiate. As we walked down this road we came to a shvil junction that gave the casual desert stroller (as opposed to the serious shviller) a choice. Continue on straight along the road and  get to the no. 40 road. Take a right hand turn along a faintly defined walking track, look up, gulp and see a path winding almost vertically up a rock face. Shvillers, of course, don't get a choice. No points for guessing in which direction we were lead. This crag that we were about to climb is called the Ramon Tooth. I have never heard of a geological feature being called a tooth, but I can guess that it is so called because a tooth is straight on both sides with a relatively small area at the top. And that pretty much describes what we were about to climb and then descend. The only consolation was that the climb was relatively short, only a few hundred metres. A very steep few hundred metres.

We had been walking now for over three hours and hadn't eaten breakfast. We'd had an orange and some nuts but were starting to feel hungry. The question is, do you climb on an empty stomach and without the caloric input needed for a good steep climb or do you go with a full stomach, possibly being weighed down by the undigested food? Decisions, decisions. In the end we decided that the view from the top would be better than the one from the bottom and it would be more pleasant having our break whilst sitting on a flat, 5*5 metre space, two hundred metres above the crater floor. Or perhaps the opposite is true…had we eaten breakfast in the shadow of this hill, there was no way we could have relaxed and enjoyed the food, knowing what was in store. Whatever. After 4 hours on the trail, we sat down on the top of the Ramon Tooth and attacked Kol-Bo Slomon's preservative laden fodder in a food frenzy worthy of a Great White.

 

If the ascent had been a grunt, then the descent was even more challenging. Both books warned us to follow the signs carefully, lest we find ourselves on the edge of an abyss. Sure enough, after descending 50 metres or so, the path disappeared and we were left trying to spot the markers. Had we not known that the route that might seem logical to us was in fact impassable, we would have thought that Mr Shvil Marker was drunk when painting the signs. The route down zigzagged over sharp rocks in what appeared to be an arbitrary fashion. In reality, Mr Shvil painter was trying to find the safest way down. Sometimes we didn't see the next marker till we crested an outcrop and looked ahead to see where we had to go. Just when we thought we'd gotten close to the bottom, the route took a sharp turn and went up a butte of jagged rocks. Getting past it was no joke, but when we looked back to the area we thought we would have been going through, we saw a straight, impassable drop. Sliding down was not really an option. These rocks were razor sharp. Eventually it bottomed out, a clear path appeared and we were back to the easy walking that typified the day before the Ramon Tooth.

After twenty four kilometres on the previous day and the stiff workout that the Ramon Tooth gave us today, we were starting to tire. My feet were blistered, Yoni's knees were complaining and for the first time in 3 years on the shvil, Garry consulted the book to find out how far we had to go till the end. Even he was tired.

We knew we were close to road no. 40 when we started to see families with young kids on the path. They had come to see the ammonite wall. For those, like me, that don't know what ammonites are, they're prehistoric shellfish. There's an exposed clay wall with hundreds of the critters stuck into them. Or at least, that's what the book said and that what the sign on the road indicated. Somehow we missed it. I don't know how, but we didn't see it. It's supposed to be a major attraction in the Ramon crater but we must have just walked right past it. We must have been really tired. Or maybe Yoni was too busy concentrating on trying to get 3G. It was his turn today to try to find out how his AFL team, the Blues, went. Like Garry and I the previous day, he should have saved his energy. They lost.

Garry may be the fittest of the three of us, but I'm the one who least likes to miss things along the way. When we discuss skipping a certain part, or taking a detour to see something interesting that is not actually on the shvil yisrael route, it is almost always me that wants to do that extra bit. We had another very steep climb, similar to the Ramon Tooth, to encounter before we got to the no. 40 road. For one of the first times en route, I played chicken. There was no logical reason to climb this nameless mountain, other than because it was on the shvil yisrael. The views from the top would have been similar to those atop the Ramon Tooth. Yoni and Garry, a little surprised that I played the "c" card, readily agreed to dodge around this part of the shvil. So rather than climbing up and over for an hour, we just trotted up to road no. 40. Today's route was meant to get to the Saronim camp ground, but since Yoni's car was at the Be'erot camp ground, there was no point going there. As far as we were concerned, shvil yisrael today finished at road no. 40.

But the adventure wasn't finished. Not by a long shot. Now it was time to curse Benad for taking Yoni so far out of the way and to try to figure out how we were going to get to Yoni's car which was 8 km away. "Simple" I chirped. "We'll hitch-hike the 3 km along Road no. 40 to the turnoff and any car going down the dirt track will pick us up."  We figured that a lone hitch-hiker would have more chance of getting a lift than 3 middle aged vagabonds. Yoni was elected to stand on the road and stick his finger out, whilst Garry and I hid behind a road sign. After 15 minutes and 4 cars (this isn't exactly downtown Manhattan here) Yoni gave up. It was my turn. After a further 15 minutes and 5 cars, I decided to walk to the turnoff, intent on still trying to catch a lift as I walked. Intent is all well and good, but results are what matter and in this case, the result was failure. I walked the 3 km to the turnoff to Be'erot campground. By this stage I was tired, my feet were sore and blistered and I had no intention of walking the 5 km down the road. Yoni and Garry had set off about 15 minutes after me and had as much luck as I did getting a lift. They decided that they could walk the 5 km to the car and set off down the track. I stayed where I was.

If road no. 40 was quiet, then this dirt track leading to no-where in the desert was deathly. The only thing missing were the vultures circling overhead. And suddenly, the German Embassy in Tel Aviv came to the rescue. Or more correctly, Hilda, who works in the embassy and her French friend Karin. How many people can say that they have hitched a ride in a vehicle with diplomatic plates in the middle of the desert? And German! In Israel! Oh the irony of it all. In any case, I had Yoni's keys, started his car and picked him and Garry up from the road. All's well that ends well.

So we finished the season covering 40 km over two days. By far the most we've done on a weekend. We knew that we had exploited to the maximum the long trip south. It was hard but felt good. There's a reasonable chance that the next winter season will see us arrive in Eilat.

 See you in October.