55th Day (Grumpy Old Shvillers)

We awoke without the pressures of the day before. We'd had a good dinner, slept in good accommodations for the 2^nd night in a row and were facing a short 13 km jaunt across the Timna National Park.  We even got to sleep in till 5.15, since the entrance to the park was only a short 2 km drive away. It is true that we once again omitted supplying certain information to Yoni regarding a very sharp ascent and sharper descent as part of the jaunt, but what you don't know can't kill you, or at least you can't complain about it until it's upon you.

The book had us mistakenly believing that the trail-head for today was about 3 km from the park entrance (I admit, I think I misread the book, but it's more fun to blame the book). At 6.00 the ticket office was closed, so we parked the car outside the gate and started to walk the 3 km to the trail, when a car, coming from within the park, opened the gate and drove out. We quickly ran back to the car and drove in, before the gate had a chance to close. Actually, I blocked off the infra-red eye so the gate would not close, but let's not get technical. We had a stroke of random good luck that saw someone, for some reason, leave a park in the middle of the desert, at 6.00 a.m, just as we entered it. I'm gonna buy a lottery ticket.

So we drove and drove and couldn't find the shvil markings. We became convinced that something was not right when we drove past a path with red markings rather than the familiar tri-color shvil markings. I re-read the book and realized that I had probably previously misread it. We returned to where we started at the visitors centre at the entrance, Yoni once again turned on Google Maps and for the second time in two days we were saved from wandering around in circles by modern technology.

We were walking on a slight upwards gradient, through the same sort of desert gullies that we'd been walking through these past 300 km or so, only this time the rocks were colored in all sorts of earth hues. Very nice. Every few hundred metres a sign explained the geographical formation or geological history and composition of certain rocks. Who knew how many different combinations of the words "volcano" "quartz" "heat" and "pressure" could be jumbled and mixed, and then printed on signs? After almost an hour of Harry Butler (the Australians will understand) the path turned abruptly to the left and we stared at a shvil sign, painted half way up a sheer,15 metre high rock-face. It seemed to be  hinting that we were to somehow scale this mini cliff. There was no path, no hand rungs and no obvious way over. It was sort of like a logic test in the field. Well, in terms of pure logic, the solution was easier than it appeared. In terms of pure physical effort, the solution was more difficult than it appeared. The shvil sign wasn't lying. We had to find a way to drag ourselves, hand over bum over foot, up the rock. We hadn't been asked to do this for a long time and it wasn't easy finding foot and hand holds in fissures in the rock. But we did succeed, rather ungracefully, I might add. And then there was another rock-face we needed to crawl over and yet another. I quite like rock climbing to be honest, but I think Yoni and Garry were enjoying it a little less. After 4 or 5 such climbs, the path returned to normal, at a slightly steeper incline. If that was the hard climb I'd read about in the book, then once again maybe I'd misread it. But that didn't seem to be the case, especially since we were surrounded by very very high mountains with vertical cliffs beneath their peaks.  Now that wouldn't be fun, I thought to myself. Eventually the path, or Mr Shvil Painter, decided which one of these peaks we were to attain. And so we started to climb. Part of it was just walking up a steep path, whilst other parts demanded more rock climbing, scrambling up crevices and general over exertion. And it never seemed to end. We could see where we had to get to, but the distance didn't seem to be getting any less, until we arrived to one last, extra steep straight path up to a ridge. Fifty metres along the ridge, 12 metal hand rungs were driven into the cliff. Climbing up the rungs like a ladder led us to what is called the Timna platform. The top of this mountain was flat and about the size of a football field, with breathtaking views of more mountains, colored red and black and more deep, yellow valleys. It may be a cliché, but we really felt we were on top of the world. The perfect place for breakfast.

The only thing disturbing our breakfast was the sight of the path we had to take to get down off this rock. Our creaking knees and ankles, aching muscles and blistered feet were all starting to panic at the thought of a repeat of yesterday's drop, down Ma'aleh Malchin. In truth, it was difficult, but no-where near the magnitude of the previous day's 500 metre descent. Yoni and I have many times thrown grace and dignity to the wind, descending over rocks on our derriere rather than on our 2 legs. Today even more time was spent sliding, given that our legs had nothing like the spring needed to walk down steep and uneven terrain.

When we weren't gasping for air on the way up or grasping for grip on the way down, we continued to grapple with the question of what the book means by technical walking. The descent yesterday, which was certainly difficult, was described as technical. Neither the ascent nor descent today was given such an honor, yet to us, scaling rock faces, deciding the best route through a crevice or climbing a cliff with the aid of hand rungs is far more technical than a steep descent on loose scree along a well-marked path. Go figure.

When we weren't contemplating  the deep meaning of technical and non-technical gut wrenching walking, medical marijuana, which has been in the news lately, was a hot topic. Given our theoretical knowledge on the subject, Garry recounted a discussion he had with a (legal) grower, regarding the different varieties and their various potential uses. This same grower also made claims about marijuana oil and female sexual pleasure. Obviously we are not expert on the subject, but we tried to imagine empirical testing methods. This is a G-rated blog, so anyone wishing for more detail will have to contact us privately.

 At the bottom of the descent the path ended in a T- junction. The sign pointing left was the continuation of shvil yisrael, through a pretty looking canyon and on to the Timna pools and Solomon's Pillars. The sign pointing right said plainly "exit".  At this stage of our shvil experience, we don't want to miss any of the main features, but we have a sort of "been there, done that" view of anything peripheral, even pretty looking canyons. Added to our deliberations, we had in mind a 5 hour drive home ahead of us. So it was a right hand turn towards the exit.  In other words, we've been on the shvil 7 years and feel that we can be a bit like grumpy old men who don't have the patience to muck around with anything that's not essential in getting us to the beach at Eilat. Our shvil life is happily coming to an end.

This is not to say that the hour's walk towards the exit was easy.  I had always wondered what walking through this area would be like if there was no path and now I had my answer. The terrain itself wasn't difficult and if there had been a path, I would have probably described it as a pleasant stroll. But without a path, we were walking in a valley exactly as nature made it and it was far more rocky and uneven. Shortly before the valley opened out to the road, the canyon we had been walking in intersected with another canyon with a defined, red marked path. We had arrived to the road at the point where we had turned around a few hours earlier.

Next part of the exit plan was hitching a ride back to the car at the visitor's centre and park entrance. After 20 minutes, 2 cars and a bus which didn’t stop, Garry decided to walk back to the car. His mountain goat feet didn't hurt as much as Yoni's and mine. Unfortunately, his walk to the car was necessary, as not a car passed in the 40 minutes that it took him to get back to the car and come pick us up.

By 12 we were heading north. A coffee stop at our usual Aroma, north of Mitzpeh Ramon brought back memories of past stops, with flat batteries in the carpark and being dripping wet and barefoot after being flooded out. This time the only reminders of past visits was the slow, snarly service.

The trip back was uneventful and would have otherwise gone unmentioned, other for the fact that Yoni's iphone, that had saved us twice on this trip, now let us down. We have a close friend who is a musician and has just released a new album. For some unknown reason, the iphone took a dislike to the music, and in the middle of every track would automatically change to a "how-to-learn-Spanish" podcast. Actually, it was quite a pity, given that we were really enjoying the music. Certainly far more than ¿Cuándo es el próximo autobús? Geeze people have weird stuff on their iphones.

So in the end we arrived home at a civilized hour and as always, tired, happy and a bit sore, but also gratified that now we had completed these two sections we only have three more days to go.

54th Day - (Just Do It)

On our first trip of every walking season over these past few years, I always say how good it is to be back on the shvil. Unfortunately over the last few years, the walking season has been very short, limited to 2 or 4 walking days. So far, we've been on the trail 7 years. That must be a record. This year it ends. For sure. Maybe. Hopefully.

In order to start this, our final season on the shvil, we had to travel almost to Eilat, walk for two days and then travel all the way back to the Galilee. You may ask yourself why not just travel to the South for 5 days and finish it. After a recent Vietnam trip (there's a separate blog for that one), it's a bit hard to take another week off work, even if all 3 of us run our own businesses, or that we just don't have 5 days spare to take off. More importantly, I don't think we have the fitness to walk 80 hard km in 5 days. It's too much for our elderly bodies (at least Yoni and I. Garry, even with a bad back, continues to be a re-incarnated mountain goat). As it is, we were going in to this leg with some trepidation. We had 24 km to cover tomorrow with no real way of splitting it up.  We were about to start our last season with the longest walk we'd make on the shvil.

As might seem logical, walking in an area that is 500 km from your home takes a bit of logistics, and so it was this time. I had to finish my work early, meet Garry at one point then Yoni at another and then get to the Eilat area, finding somewhere to eat dinner and get food for the next day. Funnily, we managed all this without any real hitches, other than a dreadful dinner at a sad and pathetic restaurant at Yotvata, near Elifaz, where we are staying. A word of advice. If you're traveling to Eilat, do not stop off here. True, there isn't anywhere else in the area, but hold off till you get to Eilat.

Unlike our Yotvata culinary road-wreck, the room at the B+B at Elifaz was excellent. And just as well, since this was going to be the first time on shvil that we would stay in one place for two nights. We knew that we had an early start and long walk ahead of us, so we turned in early, with Yoni, who had been krutzing all afternoon, continuing to be the doomsday seer for the coming day.

Overnight, Yoni cranked it up a gear, changing from krutzing mode to meltdown mode. He awoke having read on some imaginary website that today's walk was a 29 km hike rated as "difficult" which was best done in 2 days. Nothing had been organized, even though we had great accommodation and our taxi driver was waiting for us already in the carpark and we had no food, despite the fact we had enough for three days, not one. In his defense, I too was worried about the distance, but just felt that under the circumstances we had no choice but to get out on to the track and just do it.

So at 5.15, we hopped into Shimon our taxi driver's cab and commenced the 45 minute journey to Shacharut, today's starting point. I tend to wake up well in the morning, with my mouth going into overdrive as soon as my brain slips into first gear. In fact, family, friends and shvil partners have long marveled at and disdained my ability to chat with anyone, even taxi drivers, 15 minutes after waking up. And it seemed I had met my soul mate in Shimon. We chatted as if we'd been friends for years, as he happily dissected the different types of tourists that came to Eilat, how they behaved and spent their money. I listened and asked questions. Yoni continued to be grumpy and Garry just wanted some peace and quiet, first thing in the morning. 

Shacharut is an interesting looking place. It sort of look like a Jewish Bedouin encampment, comprising stone houses with junked cars strewn all around and no logic or order to the setup. In fact, at first, we thought we had arrived at an unnamed Bedouin outpost, but not many Bedouin camps have windmills for power production, new-age ornamentations such as dream-catchers in trees and composters and recycling bins. If we didn’t have 24 km ahead of us, I would have been happy to hang around a bit, or even stay a night, to see a bit more of what this Bedouin hippy place was really like.

The actual Shvil Yisrael does not pass directly through Shacharut, but beneath it, about 100 metres away. In previous legs, we would have wandered around in circles, cursing and burning precious time trying to find the path. But today, Yoni, our IT expert, put Google Maps to good use, now that the entire Shvil is on the app and you can navigate to it from your position. Within 5 minutes of wishing Shimon farewell, we found the familiar blue white and orange stripes. If Larry and Sergey had only gotten around to this earlier, we would have saved many hours of frustrating wandering over these past few years.

Amongst the conversation in the taxi, I had asked Shimon if it had rained much so far this season, to which he replied that there had been only a little rain. We were thus surprised to see from the start bunches of pretty purple flowers along the desert creek beds. Even stranger, I recognized these plants as smamicha (in Arabic), tzipornit mitzrit (in Hebrew) or Egyptian Campion (in English). I run wild greens foraging tours in the Galilee when I'm not traipsing through the desert and didn't expect to see a plant so common and tasty all the way down here in the Arava. Yoni and Garry thought I had premature heatstroke when I bent down and started eating some of the succulent leaves but were surprised when they too tasted them and found that they were deliciously mustardy. At least we wouldn't go hungry today. In fact, this purple wildflower would be one of the features that made today's walk so memorable. The further we went the thicker the spread of wildflowers. At times we passed through creek beds that rather than streams of water, had streams of purple flowers running through them. Undoubtedly we haven't seen anything like this before. At other places along the route, the purple flowers were mixed with yellow and dark magenta red ones. It wasn't just the magnificent views that accentuated nature's beauty today.

But of course, we did have plenty of magnificent views en route. When you're walking along a cliff-top above the rift valley below, with the mountains of Jordan opposite, the kilometres don't seem so bad. Especially first thing in the morning, with the sun rising in the East over those same mountains. True, midwinter desert is only about 3⁰ at sunrise, but the beauty of the walking almost had us ignore the cold. I won't go in to boring descriptions of entering nachal G'dira, continuing up Mt. Yotvata and into nachal Yotvata etc etc. Wide river beds, valleys, cliffs, desert expanse and striking colors are all things that we've seen many times but never get bored with. So often I have to pinch myself, just to confirm that I really am walking through scenery you see in National Geographic magazines. The path went up a bit and then down a bit, just enough to keep it interesting, but nothing that we hadn't negotiated quite easily in the past.  In general, the route proved to be not very difficult and not nearly as scary as what we feared before we set off. By the time we stopped for breakfast, we thought we had done about half already. As it happened, we had credited ourselves with a couple of kilomtres that we hadn't yet walked, but that wasn't much of a tragedy.

 We've noticed over the course of the shvil years, that the book will tell us to look out for a particular geographical or geological feature and sure enough, we would miss it. On our second walk, I think, we wasted 45 minutes looking for a trig marking that we never found. There's is a large and well known ammonite fossil field in Ramon Crater, about 200 shvil kilomtres to the North of where we were today that we somehow managed to miss. Today we were meant to see a certain geological formation called bulbous rocks and also another field of ammonite fossils. Of course, we missed them both. I'm starting to suspect that the guy writing the book is adding stuff in just to confuse us. If so, he has succeeded for almost 1000 km. We didn't miss, however, groups of shvillers. Many through shvillers start in Eilat in the winter in order to walk the desert when it's coolest and get to the North in time to see the wildflowers blooming. We saw a group of Israelis and an interesting group of Danes consisting of a father, his son and the son's friend. Given Israel's standing in Northern Europe today, I fear that these are the only Danish tourists in Israel at this moment.

Almost 6 hours and 18 km that we'd barely noticed had passed when we arrived to the Timna cliffs, with stunning views of the red Timna valley 500 metres below. However, we had omitted to inform Yoni that we would need to drop the 500 metres in order to get back to Elifaz. Sometimes, the less you know, the better. For a while we walked along the path as it snaked along the top of the cliffs, admiring the landscape below us. After about 2 km, it was time to start down the cliff-face. Having completed 20 km already, our muscles didn't quite have the strength of 6 hours earlier, our feet were developing secondary and even tertiary blisters, knees creaked and ankles ached. The descent was very steep and according to the book, technical. We've yet to crack the hidden code of what the difference is between what the book describes as just a plain steep descent and a technical steep descent. What made it difficult, besides the angle, of course, was the loose scree that we had to walk upon. It was a more or less well defined path, with not too much climbing down over rocks, but the loose stones made it very difficult to walk safely and steadily. Another section had us walk through what looked like a Hollywood disaster moive set, with the path winding past boulders strewn randomly, as if there had been an earthquake here only yesterday and not a million years ago.  The scariest part was where the path, whilst not especially narrow, ran down a knife's edge with steep drops on both sides. A fall on either of these sides would not have been conducive to our health. But as is always the case, it ended (safely).  It had taken us an hour to walk about a kilomtre in length and drop 500 metres in altitude. The path leveled out and we were back to plain walking. Plain boring walking, where you've done the good stuff for the day and now all that's left is getting to the end. This is the part we hate and if a car had happened by, we would have hitched a ride. Of course, when you're walking along a 2 metre wide desert path in the middle of no-where, the only car you're going to see is a mirage. If a mirage, let it be a stretch limo with champagne and playboy bunnies, please.

A particularly unflattering photo of me, with my man-boobs

 We had about 2 more km to walk and decided to have one last break before deliberating whether to veer off the shvil yisrael path and head straight back to Elifaz, which was in view from our present location, or stay on the shvil path and get to the end point at Timna National Park and try to hitch a ride back to Elifaz. (I can just hear certain readers rolling their eyes [how can you hear someone rolling their eyes?] and shouting "don't be so fucking stupid. Don't you ever learn?").  Whilst we were relaxing, massaging sore feet and deliberating about which route to take, we suddenly heard rustling. A half naked, long haired proto caveman was running down a hill and sort of landed right in front of us. He was oblivious to us, thanks largely to the earphones in his ears, where he was listening to heavy metal music. A modern cave man had just landed, here, in the middle of the outback, right in front of us. Talk about random. Garry disrupted his heavy metal serenity and asked him what he thought was the best avenue back to our B+B. He unhesitatingly stated that straight to Elifaz was the way to go and that he himself had come from there. For lack of any habitable caves in the area, we believed him. So off to Elifaz it was.

And so it was, as we completed the 24^th km of the day we arrived to the back fence of Elifaz. And here lies the problem. Elifaz is surrounded by not one fence, but two; the first, vicious barbed wire and the other, 3 metre high mesh. Fort Knox would have been easier to break in to. There is only one way to get in to Elifaz and that is via the front gate. After 24 km, we were faced with walking an extra 3 km along the perimeter security fence. Won't we ever learn?

At this point, I was out of gas, probably psychologically as much as physically. It was perfectly obvious that there was no choice but to just do it, and trudge along the perimeter of the fence until we reached the front gate. But before that, I needed to regroup a little, so Yoni and I sat down on the earth, outside the fence, for one last rest before tackling these needless kms. Garry, we thought, had gone ahead while we gather our strength. A sandwich, a piece of fruit, some gulps of water and we were off. 45 minutes later we wearily arrived back to the room. But no Garry. Very weird and quite a bit worrying. First thing, obviously, is ring him. The phone rang and a drowsy Garry answered. Garry had not gone ahead at all. He'd fallen asleep in a ditch not far from where Yoni and I had been sitting.  We didn't know that he was there and we had gone on without him. Fuck. We'd left Garry asleep in the field. To say that he was pissed off at us would be the understatement of the century. No amount of claims of an innocent mistake and apologies placated him (quite justifiably, of course). Eventually, he rested, we rested and the long day had almost ended. After last night's culinary nightmare, we were determined tonight to treat ourselves to a beer and a good meal and the only place that was going to happen was in Eilat. And we got exactly what we wanted. A good array of fresh salads, fish and seafood, washed down with cold beer in a pleasant atmosphere. A perfect end to our longest shvil day. By 8.30 we were back in the room, well fed and perhaps a little proud that we'd managed to walk 27 km today. By 8.35 we were asleep.