Matzada, Ein Gedi, Dead Sea

The Student's Union at Sede Boqer organized a student trip this weekend. We went to Matzada, Ein Gedi nature reserve, and the Dead Sea.

The trip began, after a very curvy road, at Matzada. Matzada is an ancient fortress where the last stand of the Jews against the Romans took place. You can read a bit about the history of Matzada here: Matzada history

We walked up the path to the fortress (the path at the back--not the historical snake path up the front).


Part of the fortress on top of the cliff


Inside the fortress are some impressive tile floors.

You can still see some of the remains of the Roman camps. Here is a view from the top of the fortress.




After Matzada, we went to Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, near the dead sea. There is a natural spring there, and it is an amazingly lush, green spot in the middle of the desert.


Grass at Ein Gedi, with the Dead Sea and the Jordanian Mountains in the background.


The waterfalls at Ein Gedi create pools at the bottom. We went for a swim after our hike to the waterfalls. Swimming outside at the end of November!

Finally, we ended up at the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is an incredibly salty sea between Israel and Jordan. You can actually see the salt in the water (it looks viscous) and it feels really oily against the skin. The water is also so salty, that you can float on the surface without effort....


It's a very bizarre feeling. Once your legs start floating to the top, there is no way to stop them--they just pop right up to the surface! Getting back out is an adventure, especially not getting the salt in your eyes as you try and put one leg down into the water, grip at the bottom with your toes so that you can hold that leg in place while trying to put the other one down, all the while both your feet are inexplicably drawn to the surface. Starting from floating on your front is even more of an adventure. It's not a place I would choose to go relax in the water, but it's something that has to be tried!

The sun started setting and it got cold really quickly! We all bundled up and headed back to Sede Boqer. Here's a view of the Dead Sea at the end of the day, with the Jordanian mountains in the background.


p.s. thanks for the comments Tess!

International dinner

I know that I promised locusts next, but if I'm going to keep to this whole "chronological thing" than I'm going to have to break that promise.......plus, the suspense is exciting? Especially because I am taking so long to post?

We had an international dinner here for the students. Everyone was supposed to bring food typical of their home country. But what's typical for Canada? Especially whose ingredients are available in Israel? So I decided on Pierogies.
"Pierogies?", you ask? "Are those even Canadian?".
Well, no, not originally. But they're very typical in Canada, and especially in Saskatchewan, .....plus I really missed pierogies. I've realized though, that if I really miss a food from Canada, I'm just going to have to learn to make it myself. Pierogies were much easier than I expected....I mean they were really really hard, I'm just very talented : )


Pierogies in progress..... They're stuffed with potatoes and cheese. I can't find any cheese really sharper than a mozarella though, so they are a bit milder than I'm used to.


And the finished product.....Have to admit it, but I was pretty impressed with myself. Especially after a student from Poland told me that I made them "exactly right. They tasted just like home." They tasted just like home for me too.

Arad

I went collecting again this weekend with Efrat. This time her supervisor came along, and their lab visitor, and we actually stayed to collect. It was interesting for me to help collect. I think it was also interesting for them for me to be helping, mainly because they were only interested in a few families of spiders, and although I'm pretty sure I knew enough to separate 'spider' from 'not spider', beyond that I was pretty much a novice......there was a lot of "this one has a red shiny butt....it's kind of irradescent.....do you need this one?" You can see I knew a lot of the technical 'spider terms' as well.


We started the day in a Wadi beside the highway between Arad and the Dead sea. After the floods the week before, the plants in the Wadi had started to germinate. This is some of the first green I've seen!


Sometimes there was just a bit of green poking through cracks in the mud.


And sometimes there was a whole lot of green!


Picking up rocks to look for spiders, you find all kinds of interesting things. This gecko covered it's eyes with it's tail everytime we looked at it.....like a little kid hiding by putting their hands over their eyes.


It was a very pretty area. Sometimes you could forget there was a highway 10 metres behind us.


Then we moved to another area near Arad. You can see Arad in the back on the right in this picture.


We found more crocuses (a different type this week) at this site, which we were very excited about


This little bit of colour really does change the look of the desert


We also found some flax in flower


We took this picture of the beetle we found on my t-shirt. Efrat put it there and it just stayed......it's defense strategy is just to freeze, and so it just sat there.....

I feel as though, because it takes me a little while to update my blog, and so I'm writing about the past, and already know what is coming in the 'future' that I should be giving previews at the end of my posts. Or maybe I should just leave everyone in suspense (although this might be a stretch of the use of the word).......hmmmm.......coming up next week......locusts. Enticing?

Visitors to the greenhouse

These are a few friends that came to visit me while I was working in the greenhouse. It was much appreciated........shhhh, but I was getting a little bored.


A wolf spider. I found it inside the bags I kept my seed and sand in.


I don't know what this is. Some sort of lizard.....it gave me something else to do other than shovel sand for a few minutes

Nizzana

I went exploring with Efrat again this weekend. We took a visitor from her lab to look for spiders near the Egyptian border around the Nizzana border crossing and then went walking ourselves.


It's a really interesting looking area--the wind and sand have worn the rock smooth into some really cool looking formations


The view of the area from above--you can see the pathways of smooth rock worn in the floor below.


Some more smooth rock formations...


Another view of the area. You can see Egypt in the far background--looks very different from Israel, eh?


These rows of crystal pipe like formations are all along the sides of the cliffs. I don't know what they are, how they are formed....but I do know they aren't salt--at least to the taste : )


And, of course, we looked for some spiders on the way back. We found this widow in some juniper bushes.

The drive from Beer Sheva

I picked up my experimental tubs from Beer Sheva today. I was pretty sure that they wouldn't all fit on to the truck, but what do you know, they did (at least in a special 'only in Israel' kind of way).
When we were loading these on to (and in to--I'd already removed the pile from the passenger seat when I took the photo) the people at the store kept asking me "You're driving where????". Two people who worked in the store were helping me strap them down. Then their friend came to pick them up for lunch, and started helping too.....at one point I had 2 keter employees, their friend, and two random customers circling the truck, pulling on straps, and repeating "You're driving how far?" interspersed with "You'll be fine. Just drive very....very...slowly". After it was all strapped down the started pulling on the tubs to see if they could move it--when the truck rocked a lot, but the tubs stayed put, we figured I'd be fine.

Well, obviously, the drive back went fine. I can't imagine what I must have looked like driving these down the highway from BeerSheva. I know I would have been scared to be behind me....

Desert Crocus

This weekend I went looking for crocuses in the desert with another student, Efrat. We had been looking for a while, and not seen any, but she had a memory of a particular wadi (dried river bed) that the walls above them had been filled with them a few years ago. After some looking we managed to find it-- and it was full of the flowers again! An amazing sight--bright yellow flowers along rocky walls with very little other vegetation. Everytime we would round a corner and see another group we would get huge grins on our faces.

It reminded me of looking for crocuses when I was young. Every spring my Mom would take us out the the Qu'applle Valley in Saskatchewan after the snow melted to look for crocuses. It was the first sign of spring for us, and it was so exciting because you knew that things were going to start growing soon and there is a huge sense of renewal. Efrat said that here the crocus is the first sign of winter--and it seems very much the same....you go looking for them, and are excited about these first signs of life peeking out from the desert again.


This is the area we went looking for the crocuses. They grow along the sides of the Wadi's, in the ridges formed by the rock.


Efrat and the crocuses


They grow fairly clumped in very little soil




Very bright yellow flowers peeking out from between rocks