Jerusalem, in a nutshell
Dec 23rd 2007sarahMiddle East & Travel
So, you all know my wonderful husband took me to Egypt over my 30th birthday, but do you all know what I did on the actual day of my 30th? No? Well, read the title of this post!! Yep, you got it, we went to Jerusalem!
Now, we didn’t set out to be globetrotters on this holiday. Nope, it was all going to be about sun and sand and swimming – you get my drift. However, when we got to the hotel and realized that one of the “day” side trips they offered was to Jerusalem, we couldn’t pass it up. I mean, how often can I ring mom and dad up and say, “oh yeah, by the way I was in Jerusalem just last week.” Exactly, not very!
So we were really excited until we realized that the bus was going to pick us up at 1 o’clock in the morning, and it would return us back to our hotel at around 1 o’clock the next morning. Yep, you got it, a twenty-four hour round trip – by coach. But, we weren’t deterred and decided we’d be game and cracked on.
Apart from the coach ride, the early rising and late return, the trip was pretty amazing. We went by road to Taba , where we crossed the border into Israel. That in itself was an experience. We left our bus on the Egyptian side and picked up another bus and an Israeli guide. The first thing our new guide pointed out to us was that when we looked at the sea, we could see four countries from where we stood, which was pretty neat. Looking towards the sea, we could see Israel (the country we were in), Egypt (the country we had just left), as well as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Pretty neat, eh? And then they shuffled us back on the bus and we drove through Eilat on our way to the Dead Sea.
We drove for a long way, and the landscape appeared to be quite barren, although apparently there is a lot of agriculture which comes out of Israel. It was pretty neat, and even though we were extremely tired we learned a lot from our guide and enjoyed the scenery and taking pictures out of the bus windows.
We kept on to the Dead Sea, and when we arrived, had the opportunity to swim, which Paul and I opted out of. We hadn’t taken a change of clothes and I didn’t relish the thought of hanging out all day long feeling half clean – although I must say that there were showers available and Paul and I were just being spoilsports. The Dead Sea was an interesting place. We only had about 45 minutes there at the sea in total, so I snapped some pictures of the salt crystals forming on the sand, and some other scenery.
The Dead Sea is quite a spa resort type area and there were tons of people around swimming in the sea and using therapeutic mud on their skin. You could see where people had made this into a complete holiday destination.
We were pretty rushed for time, and so made our way back to the coach to head on to Jerusalem. After a wee snooze and a couple hours on the bus, we had finally made it to Jerusalem, where our first stop was the Mount of Olives, where we got some lovely views of the city.
From there it was almost a blur of a day, we saw so much! However, I can outline things a bit.
The next stop on the tour was the Temple Mount, and then on to the Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall.
After this, we had a yummy lunch and then walked through the city to the point where we began the process of walking the Stations of the Cross, ending at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This was an interesting journey, for a number of reasons. One of them being that this walk seemed to take us through the busy markets of the city.
After rushing through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we then went to the church which is supposed to be the site of the Last Supper, and King David’s Tomb. Once that was done, we got back on the coach and turned around to head back to the border.
The trip to Jerusalem was wonderful but exhausting. We saw so much in one day, I’m surprised that I still retain the information about it all that I do. I wouldn’t trade it though, and in fact, I wouldn’t mind going back to Israel again. I wasn’t impressed by the hygiene (the toilets were quite dirty) , but we found the people there to be extremely friendly, and that’s really what matters. So, maybe our next beach holiday should be Tel Aviv!
