Israel day 1

Up at 7am for breakfast and then swimming with dolphins at a private beach on the Red Sea just south of Eilat.  This involved watching them being fed, then a 10 minute snorkelling lesson before heading out to float around with the dolphins in an enclosed area.  We even saw 5 or 6 of them swimming below and adjacent to us.

Julie and I had a large French lady Bibi in our group of 3 tethered together, who was quite anxious about the experience.  At one point Julie stopped swimming and said she had a cramp, whereupon Bibi exclaimed very loudly “oh shit!” then looked mortified.  I informed her that in Australia we say “merde”, and she thought that was funny.  At least someone laughs at my dad jokes.

Then to the airport to catch a small plane for the flight over the Negev desert and the beautiful blue Dead Sea into Tel Aviv.  Funny, I'd always thought that being so full of salt the Dead Sea would have been white.

 

It was interesting to see how quickly the Judean desert merges into the greenery of the coastal strip as you go towards the Mediterranean: well in spring at least, apparently soon the whole area down here will be dry.  The plane was late and the traffic from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was heavy as people headed home after their Passover holidays, so we didn’t get into our hotel until 5.30pm. 

We met our tour organiser who gave us our program, which is packed, hence posting these blogs on a daily basis looks uncertain. And it started tonight with a bus trip and walk to a restaurant which served excellent Moroccan food, with a guest speaker talking about the psychological aspects of integrating Ethiopian Jews into Israel.  Then we dragged our increasingly weary bodies back onto the bus for a trip to the Wailing Wall to commence a tour of the tunnels underneath the Western wall of the old city.  This was very interesting but we had to fight to stay alert to listen to all the fascinating detail of the history of the mountain and Herod’s construction of the Western wall and his short-lived temple.

                                          Mal, with Jewish mini-hat thing on.

After 75 minutes of that, we walked back past the wailing wall which was packed with ultra-orthodox Jewish men in black coats and black hats all chanting, singing, clapping and swaying back and forward.  Apparently they only do this on the Tuesday night after the Passover period, so lucky for us.

Back onto the bus and then to the hotel a little after 11pm, whereupon we fell pretty much spent into bed.