Day 73 - Rock garden

We collected our hire car and we weren't long out of Jerusalem when we started to notice the arid desert environment. We did pass plantations of date palms but apart from that the area seemed to be more conducive to growing rocks than anything else.

It wasn't long before we passed the sea level sign and kept descending until we were around 450 metres below sea level. It was a sunny day so the Dead Sea was bluer than we remembered from when we had visited on the Jordan side on a previous trip.

We arrived at our first stop, Masada and were shocked to get out of the car and find it was 35 degrees. This is officially winter in Israel but the weather had yet to turn so was still unseasonably warm. We walked to the cable car entrance to take us to to Herod's fortress on the plateau above. Once we arrived we were shocked at the line of tourists waiting to get the cable car back and now understood why we saw so many people walking down in the heat. The views from the top cemented the obvious reason why Herod chose this place as a safe place to build a palace and a fortress, it's pretty impossible for anyone to sneak up the sides. Unfortunately the site was full of noisy school groups, and when we were stuck with them in the cable car on the way down it wasn't the best experience.

We then drove not far down the road to Ein Gedi, an oasis in the desert. As we arrived we read that it closes at 4pm and the last entrance is 3pm, we just made it in at 2.59pm. The early closing is to allow the animals quiet time and access to the water without humans there. We had to pass more large school groups who have not heard of turning the volume down, no wonder they give the animals a break! The surrounding landscape for miles and miles is just rocks and desolation so to see a patch gushing water, water falls, greenery, hirax and ibex is quite strange.

We drove onto our reservation for the evening which was just outside Jericho at a place called Vered Yericho, we couldn't stop in Jericho itself as it is in the Palestinian area and we weren't allowed to take our Israeli hire car there. The small town we stayed in was a gated community, we were stopped at a checkpoint and our passports examined, it makes you wonder how anybody could get around the country without official documentation.