Dead Sea

Sunday the 25th.
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Photos of the dead sea - lower down.

Gotta start off this post by saying – this photo is from nearby the Dead Sea, a nature reserve in a desert canyon.
The professional camera didn’t work, so Yonathan did this with my phone.. WOW!

Ever since I heard about that you can float in the Dead Sea without any effort, I’ve been wanting to go there, because I’ve never been able to float. I heard it was super relaxing, full of minerals and the desert full of stars, which is exactly what I needed.
So in my very short “list” of things I wanted to do in Israel, of course I wanted to visit the Dead Sea!

That Sunday me and my friend Yonathan went on a bus to Jerusalem, and switched to a bus to a place called ... I cannot for the love of anything remember....
We went a long way, around Palestinian area of Jericho and some date plantations, passing by the mountain of Ararat, and further on south into the desert. We arrived quite late, a couple hours before sundown, and after the 3 hours in busses with (to me) ice cold air conditioning, the 40 degrees Celsius were MORTIFYING!
There was no way to get out of the heat, undressing would not help, it felt like a strangling sauna. I think I should count this as being in Africa, haha!

ISRAEL FACT – The Dead Sea is the lowest (natural that a human can walk on without ladders) point on earth.

Yonathan suggested we don’t bring a tent, and why should we? There’s not much to hide from there, so when we went to look for a place to sleep, a green patch under some palm trees besides a spa-hotel seemed nice.

After waking up a buttload of times because there was insects, we slept in a slope and it was just too damn hot, sometime around 3 am the sprinklers went off.
Awesome.
In panic we dragged all the stuff further uphill, and tried to go back to sleep while half the stuff was still wet.
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A bit more than an hour later, they went off again. Everywhere.
So we had to pack up everything quickly, and moved to the beach.
Around 04:30, the sunrise came…
One could see Jordan on the other side.

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I gotta say – waking up at 7 am and immediately walking into the water, was absolutely amazing. I was surprisingly awake, and there was not many people around. The water… well it felt like a warm puddle. An enormous, warm puddle. It felt thick, like magnesium oil, and a bit creepy to think this enormous puddle didn’t have ANY life in it.

I felt a bit tingly all over my body, and all the teeny-tiny wounds hurt like hell.
And laying down, floating between earth and sky…. Absolutely magical, and so relaxing…
Everyone should try it sometime. Wow.
 
Then we went to eat, and into a canyon in a nature reserve. Yonathan had told me about the beauty of it, and it was already after 9 am so we needed to hide from the sun before it burned us to ashes.
We went in there, and WOW it was beautiful..

​After a while of walking we decided to do a photoshoot on the cliff, and asked the forest ranger, Brian, for this area for permission to climb. He wanted to supervise so he came with us, but the camera didn’t work for some reason, so the ranger asked if we wanted to come into the closed part of the nature reserve.
OF COURSE WE DO!
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We climbed up and over a cliff, and as we turned a corner to walk right through the creek running in the middle of the canyon, Brian turned to us and said “Welcome to my office!” with an ecstatic gleam in his eye!
And oh… it was beautiful….

Cannot even describe the beauty of it, and how calm and serene I was when we walked out of there.
All we had time for after hiding for hours in a small pool in the creek was to catch the bus, and go on further up north where we found ourselves a spot for the night.
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Again, without a tent, but luckily without many insects, and without sprinklers!

Next morning I floated one last time in the Dead sea, and picked some salt with me, haha!!
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As much as I enjoyed it, we eventually went back to the road, and went on the bus to Jerusalem, where I would spend the next day.

More on that in the next post…

Love and light!