Dec 24 - Palestine and the Dead Sea

With our early morning start our guide took us on a driving tour of the Hasidic neighborhood of Jerusalem that rejects modern values. "Welcome to the seventeenth century", he said, and, yeah, it was a total dump.

After a brief stop on the Mount of Olives for a view of the old city, we headed east towards the Dead Sea and our guide decided to take a short-cut through Zone B of the West Bank to save time. "Most tour guides are too afraid to go through here, but these people are not all terrorists and we've saved thirty minutes." (We did mention that our guide is packing heat, right?)

A few hours later we were at the mountaintop fortress of Masada. Unfortunately we didn't have time to take the Snake Path either up or down, since (as you can surely tell from these blog posts) the day's schedule was quite full.

After Masada we headed for a Dead Sea spa, and anyone who knows me knows I just don't feel myself if I don't get my mud treatment:

And finally another "box is ticked" with a float in the Dead Sea:

(Another nice "bookends" moment (though unplanned this time) is that we've been to the highest place on Earth and the lowest within almost exactly a year of each other.)

Afterwards we had several hours snoozing in the car as we made our way down to the Eilat-Aqaba border crossing into the Kingdom of Jordan. We thought our tour representative was joking when he told us to keep our passports out because we would need them "seven or eight times". After having them checked four times on the Israeli side, he directed us to cross "No Man's Land" to Jordan on our own because this was as far as he could go. No Man's Land was indeed just that: 80 meters of bare road with barbed wire on each side with mine-fields beyond. We dragged our bags across the bleak space, alone and in the dark, wondering if it would be quite so easy to make this trip the opposite way tomorrow. Reaching the other side, we had our passports checked four more times and thought we were free in clear until at the very last security post the guard told us to wait and disappeared inside his guard post for unknown reasons. He returned moments later with baklava for us, and explained it was his first day back at work after getting married, so please share in his happiness and welcome to Jordan!

We had quite a chuckle about the whole thing as we were having cocktails at the Aqaba Hilton thirty minutes later.

(And of course, now we find out that right on cue Jordan is mixed up in an international incident just as we've arrived.)