51st day (Jerusalem)

It has long been said that in relation to the long and largely unsuccessful peace negotiations with our neighbours, the Palestinians, both sides know what the final agreement will more or less look like. The hardest nut to crack will be Jerusalem. "Leave that to the end," the experts say. "Don't talk about it till you're almost finished. Close off everything else and by the time both parties get to an agreement, they won't throw the whole package out over one point." Therefore, THE Carbolet, the hardest, most dangerous, most unconquerable section of the 1000 km of the Israel National Trail, has been nicknamed by us, "Jerusalem", because it has been left to the end. One of us, who goes un-named, refuses to believe that he can do it safely. And like other less important matters, here too, negotiations on how to negotiate our own shvil Jerusalem remain fruitless.

In the end, we gave up. We're pretty close to the end and we still couldn't find a way of convincing Yoni that, if he's walked 800 or so kilometres with us, some of which have been easy, some hard, sometimes with a bad knee, sometimes with a bad back, that he could get through the Carbolet. For the first time in 50 walking days spread over 5 years, we were walking a shvil section without Yoni. It felt strange.

The guidebook deems this 17 km section too difficult to do in one day. It advises walkers to take the only possible exit point, after a mere 8 km and walk down 4 non shvil km, return next time, climb those same 4 non-shvil km, and complete the remaining 9 km. Garry and I decided that if this was the advice, then we could do a "quickie". We would go down to the Negev and stay overnight in Yeruham, which is the closest settlement to the starting point. We'd be up at dawn, walk the first section, order a bush taxi to take us back to the car and head home. Simple. And it more or less worked.

Dotted along, or close to the shvil yisrael route, there are good-hearted souls who open their houses and offer shvillers a hot shower and a bed and for the night. These people are called shvil angels. The magnamity of inviting total strangers into your house, just because they are walking the length of the country, is one of the great features of the shvil. I have written a number of times throughout this blog that whilst the varied and beautiful landscape of tiny Israel is the main reason for setting off on this journey, the opportunity to meet the equally as varied human landscape is often just as good a reason. If walking without Yoni was a first, we figured we'd have another first and try staying with a shvil angel. It's quite easy finding a shvil angel. Lists of the hundreds of shvil angels can be found in a few different places on the internet. Three days before we set off I contacted Avishay and asked if he could put us up. He readily agreed.

Armed with token gifts of a cake and a bottle of wine, we arrived at Avishai's caravan in Yeruham not knowing what to expect. Sometimes, it seems that this country has gone totally and irreversibly down the tubes. You hear the news and nothing seems to be right. And then you stumble upon young, idealistic people like Avishay and his partner Ilana and you realize that there's still something to believe in here. Avishay studies economics at Be'er Sheva University. What we didn't know is that there is a large number of young graduates or students like Avishay, who want to do something positive for the country. They have decided that they want to come to struggling communities like Yeruham and try to make a difference. They get cheap housing and in return become involved in various local projects. We didn't even get to meet Ilana, as she was in Be'er Sheva helping set up a secular Jewish studies centre. Before and after dinner, Garry and I had long and fascinating conversations with Avishay on a wide range of subjects. I can only wish him and Ilana all the best in whatever they set their hearts and minds to in the future. Whatever it is, I'm sure that Israel will be the better for it.

Next morning we were up at 5. That's not to say that we awoke at 5. I spent most of the night nodding off to sleep and then being punched by Garry. For his part, Garry spent half the night trying to sleep, in between punching me in order to stop my snoring. It was a Punch and Gammy show. Anyhow, not entirely refreshed, we sneaked out of the caravan by 5.45  and drove, as planned, to the Oron chemical factory, where we parked Garry's car.

As I mentioned earlier, this section is regarded as the most difficult on shvil yisrael. With my combination of under fitness and over fatness, I was, for the first time, scared when I started walking. I honestly had no idea how difficult it was going to be and how I would cope with it. I was going to get through it, and that was that. The first kilometer and a half was easy. Huh, I thought. No worries. And then we started to climb…and climb…and climb. Sometimes we would walk, sometimes climb and sometimes crawl. But always up. Steeply up. Until we reached the peak, or more correctly the first peak. Because sure enough, as we reached one peak, another would appear 100 metres further up the trail. Once the ascent more or less evened out, the hard part started (as if the climb wasn't hard enough). We were walking along the ridge above hamachtesh hagadol, or the large crater. In reality, this crater is indeed bigger than the nearby hamachtesh hakatan, the small crater, but not as big as the Ramon crater. Trouble is whoever named this the big crater hadn't yet discovered and named the Ramon crater, so the name stuck, even though it isn't the biggest crater.

This ridge consisted of a straight cliff drop to our right and a very steep, very sharp incline on our left. We were walking along the point of a triangle. It was difficult, uncomfortable walking, with our left leg 40 cm lower than our right, such was the angle.  The walking along the razor's edge continued for about an hour and a half, sometimes walking up a bit, sometimes down a bit. Eventually the route dropped down and away from this knife edge. I use the word route and not path because the way we were meant to walk was well marked, but there was very little clear, hewn path.  Here, Mr Shvil Painter knew that there was no room for him to be lazy. A misplaced marker could have very very serious consequences. Eventually even Mr. Shvil Marker had enough of this, but not before a sharp drop, which of course was followed by a steep rise and eventually another drop into a valley and away from the difficult cliff's edge terrain. Maybe I'm getting blasé . The views today were very pretty, as you might expect when walking along a knife edged cliff top, but perhaps my concentration on self-preservation prevented me from really saying "wow…unbelievable…" Or maybe I'm just plain spoilt for amazing views.

If this was a section of firsts, then another unfortunate first had to be dealt with. I don't know if it was a direct result of the difficult terrain or it just happened, irrespective of the difficulty, but for the first time on the shvil I sustained an injury. At one point not too long after we'd started the actual carbolet, cliff edge walking, my knee went one way, my body the other. When you're miles away from any sort help or escape route, you grin and bear it. A large part of the remainder of the day was walked with pain running down the external side of my right knee. We have missed quite a lot of walking days due to Yoni's knee problems, and in some absurd way, it's as if Yoni's ghost cursed me with a knee injury, as retribution for walking without him. Now it remains to be seen if the curse is just a jarred knee, minor strain or torn ligament.

As said, we were planning to walk to the halfway point and then take a blue marked path 4 km off the official shvil yisrael route to our pick up point. As has so often happened, there was a breakdown in communication between us and the book. In this case, and upon rereading it numerous times, the book described what we had to do inaccurately and we subsequently missed the turn off.  Sometimes you miss a turn off, back track a few minutes and no harm done. And sometimes you miss a turn off, climb an ascent that is equally as hard, if not more so than the one you did 4 hours earlier and walk another 15 minutes along a knife edged slanted cliff, until you re-read the book and realize that there's been a mistake. Guess which type of missed turn-off this was?  Now for another first. Call it a meltdown, a brainfade, a kriza, dropping or losing the plot, spitting the dummy. I had it all. When I realized that I'd spent 12,000 calories climbing a near vertical incline, had reached the highest point on this leg ,all for nothing AND now had to do it all again in reverse, with a bung knee, I just sat down on this sharp escarpment and swore to my heart's discontent. I used the entire swearing vocabulary of English, Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish and Russian, and then invented some more words that hadn't yet been thought of. Poor old Garry had to just stand around and put up, rather stoically I might add, with my temper tantrum. We had a decision to make and then to act on it. We could continue on, through a route that was probably harder than what we'd just done, or turn back, knowing that the past hour had been a waste of time and energy. Unfortunately, I felt that the serious descents that lay ahead were not possible given the state of my wrenched knee. Otherwise we would have continued on. But no, it was back, down what we'd spent an hour climbing, then further dropping down through Nachal Mador, where we'd planned to meet Danon, our Bedouin 4*4  bush taxi driver. We backtracked with billows of smoke rising from my ears. By the time we'd gotten back to the point that we'd passed 2 hours previously, my blood pressure had returned to something approximating normal and enough blood was flowing to my brain to allow for coherent conversation.

There was quite a lot of evidence that there had been some rain here during this winter. The ground was damp her and there and the creek beds that we were walking though were very green. It was very nice, if a little incongruous, seeing wild flowers pop up next to bright green weeds in desert creeks. The varying shades of green were a welcome relief to the yellows of the surrounding desert.

 

 

Ho hum. Nachal mador proved to be another desert nachal, pretty enough, very green, gradually widening until it was just a broad yellow plain. We weren't sure how far it was to the meeting point with Danon, but had a sneaking feeling it was another couple of kilometres. To be honest, after not altogether successful dealings with Danon in the past, we weren't so sure that he was going to meet us at all, even though I'd spoken to him a number of times and he assured me that he knew exactly where we wanted to be picked up. I'm happy he knew, because we weren't so sure we knew where we wanted to picked up. Bugger this. We were tired, I was sore and he had a Jeep. We stopped and told him that we wanted him to drive to us, rather than us walk to him. Garry had a good feeling about Danon this time, though Garry often suffers from an overabundance of optimism. He got it right this time. 10 minutes later than the agreed time (20 minutes earlier than Beduoin Mean Time) we climbed into Danon's Jeep. Barely 24 hours after we headed south we were back home, safe and sound, having negotiated THE carbolet, or at least half of it. Our own private Jerusalem was difficult, but not nearly as hard as it's made out to be.