It's hard to believe that almost a month has passed since I came to Israel. In a few days I will head home again to sort out my experiences and impressions, not to mention the many photos I and others have taken.
Yesterday I finally got to the Dead Sea. Spring has come and the rains have passed, so my cousin Dan was able to travel the dramatic road into the wilderness, passing many famous sites, such as the reputed locale of Sodom and Gomorrah, where a free-standing monolith roughly shaped like a person is labeled "Lot's wife," after Abraham's sister-in-law, who was supposedly turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at her home in the doomed city.
The Dead Sea itself shines in the desert sun with the sort of turquoise intensity one otherwise sees only in travel brochures hawking vacations in Greece.
A popular resort site, the place sports several multistory hotels, yet there is something bedraggled about them, staffed as they are by an overabundance of teenagers, eager only to chat among themselves.
A knot of these kids, bizarrely garbed as ancient Egyptians, posed in the doorway as tourists shopped for Dead Sea beauty products in the gift shop and their children patrolled the arcades.
I walked down to the beach in my newly purchased rubber shoes, having been warned that there are sharp stones in the seabed and on the strand.
In fact, the place was littered with shards of concrete and rebar, and I was glad I had heeded that warning.
It had been years since I had worn a swimsuit or gone to the beach, even ones close to home, but I didn't want to miss the experience of floating in this Sea, which famously contains so much salt that no one can sink in it, not even a non-swimmer like myself.
As I tentatively extended a leg into the water, I was surprised to find that the water did not feel at all cold. Apparently, it coats the skin with oil that makes the water feel like a warm bath.
I bobbed around for a while before rinsing off and changing to prepare for our next activity, climbing up Masada, the hilltop castle of King Herod and most famously, last holdout of a band of Jewish rebels against Roman rule who killed themselves rather than be taken by the enemy, or so the legend runs.
The trail up the mountain looked quite formidable from the ground, and so it was, especially to a pair of aging hikers.
My cousin had forgotten a hat, and I didn't bring a pair of shorts on the trip. None of my relatives is my size.
We started out well though, taking swigs of water to fortify us as we trudged up the rocky trail, steeply etched into the hillside. We could have taken the cableway, but I longed to exercise my aching muscles, having spent too much time sitting in cars and buses.
But the heat got to us both, and we stopped frequently to rest. Three quarters of the way up, my cousin Dan had an asthma attack and had to take medication, but we finally made it, after an hour of climbing
Like Akko, this site contains layer after layer of history, a microcosm of this contested patch of land, taken and retaken by one regime after another..
The storehouses and kitchens of Herod's palace gave on magnificent views of the surrounding desert and Dead Sea, now greatly reduced by depleted stores of the water that feeds it.
Clearly, the view was as available at that time to slaves and commoners as it was to kings.
A sign at the site of an ancient Byzantine chapel told how the monks once gardened the steep slopes, training their donkeys to go unaccompanied down the hill and return laden with vegetables from the garden.
At 4:30, a loudspeaker warned us that the last cable car would be leaving soon, and the site would close. With an hour and a half of sunlight remaining, we decided to walk, and set off on the shaded path., where we chatted with a young monk in training all the way down the hill.
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