More adventures with April! We returned from Petra Tuesday evening, and headed out on Thursday for more site seeing. First we split a cab to take us to the stalactite cave in Bet Shemesh, which is a small town just outside Jerusalem.
The cave was discovered in 1969 when they were blasting the rock. Some of the formations date back 300,000 years. The cave was surprisingly small, though some of it is closed off because it's not safe. However, it was still very amazing and beautiful. The shapes and formations are crazy! The stalactites were everything from thick to thin, ginormous, tiny, wrinkly, ripply, wavy, ribby, and smooth, they were all shapes and sizes! It was really cool. The only weird thing was that the lights in the cave are colored, so it was sort of like a disco cave or something. We weren't sure if they were just trying to be cool, or if the lighting helps with preservation. Nonetheless, it was quite an amazing site. It didn't take us nearly as long as we thought, so we got ice cream and hung out a little before heading back to our taxi (who was nice enough to wait for us). Pictures weren't allowed in the caves, but I was sneaky with my ipod since it has no flash so the pictures of the cave aren't the greatest quality.
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| View of Bet Shemesh from the cave |
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| Cave |
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| Cave |
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| Cave |
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| Cave |
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| Cave |
The rest of the afternoon we took it easy because we had a long night ahead of us. Skye and I went to Katherine's to make dinner with her and April and to hang out before our night adventure.
Originally Thursday night we had planned on having a night out on the town with some of our friends. But at the last minute we found out Rothberg was having a desert night tour for the international grad students, and many of our friends were going. We scrambled to get registered, which involved some point buying (Rothberg has a point system and you can spend them on different trips and outings, if you don't have any earned points, you can buy them), and was extremely complicated with me being an undergrad and April being a non student. But thankfully with Katherine and Skye's mad skills of persistence and charming the Israelis, we were able to get it worked out in time.
The bus left at 10:15pm from the city center, then we picked up a crowd from the student village on Mount Scopus and we were on our way. It was about a two hour drive to the Negev desert, somewhat near the Dead Sea.
Apparently the night tour is a thing because there was a parking area with quite a few cars and a couple other buses. But it was definitely the desert! There was nothing out there, not even restrooms. We had a tour guide, the Rothberg activities coordinator, and a security guy with us. Our tour guide gave us each numbers (there were 40 of us) so we could keep count and gave us specific directions which included bathroom instructions: don't go too far, and bring a buddy....sometimes being female is very inconvenient! This was too bad because I had to go before we even got off the bus, but I held it!!! Then we went off into the desert! We were instructed to bring flashlights, but luckily the moon was SOOOO bright that we didn't need them (the guide was happy about that, it's sort of the point of the night tour).
We went down into the Wadi Pratzim where there was once a river. The rock walls, sand and gravel were all very white. Our first stop with the guide was at a large wall with many many layers of rock. But it was actually very soft and powdery, it was crazy! Really cool!
At our next stop we did a trivia game about the terrain and wildlife in the wadi. Our team won, woo hoo! As we moved on to our next stop we passed quite a few people from the other tour groups, but most of the time it was just us.
We got to our next stop and we all sat down. The guide had three volunteers (two of which were Skye and Eric) read something, and then she handed out one numbered card to every person. The cards each said something about silence. About how silence is deep, eerie, calming, terrifying, relaxing, etc. After each person read their card we had 10 minutes of silence to listen to the desert. It was so cool to hear nothing and to be in the bright of the moon but the dark of the night. You could hear the wind, but there weren't trees or grass to rustle.
After the silence some people went on a bathroom adventure, but I felt it was too risky because random tourists would walk through, and we couldn't go far away enough since we were in a wadi. Soooo I continued to hold it! We turned and walked back the way we had come. We stopped at a small cave, but unfortunately it wasn't very safe so we couldn't go inside. We did take a look inside and our guide told us some stories. She told us a story about how a group of students in the 60s drove a bus through the wadi. The curve right by the cave was too narrow to fit, but because the rock walls are so soft, they thought they could squish through it. Turns out they couldn't. So they were stuck and stranded! Finally a few of them walked all the way to the nearest place with life, which I think was the dead sea, for help. Eventually, to get the bus out of the wadi, they had to take it apart piece by piece!
We turned a few more corners and climbed out of the wadi through this steep, narrow and sandy passage. So sandy that it was quite hard to climb through, and everyone was COVERED in the rock powder once they made it to the top. It was actually pretty funny.
We did our count (there is always one idiot who forgets their number so for a couple minutes we thought we had a missing person, thankfully they just forgot) and climbed back on the bus. The bus took us to a bon fire about 5 to 10 minutes away from the wadi. It was really nice, they had these huge mats set out for us to sit on and a table full of sweets, they even brought us s'mores ingredients! Such a must-have for us Americans, but we had to explain the concept to some of the other international students. I can't imagine going through life without s'mores!!! haha. They also had coffee and tea for us and they even brought milk to heat up and told us to put a chocolate bar in it for hot chocolate. So cute! We hung out for a while enjoying the fire when I just couldn't hold it anymore.
Thankfully right when I was thinking of going on a potty adventure one of the girls came to our mat to ask if any other ladies needed to go. Hooray for potty buddies! haha! Katherine decided to go with us as well. It's always good to travel with Katherine, the planner, who brought paper towels for such an occasion! And I keep hand sanitizer in my purse, so we were set. I won't get into these details, but we found a nice ravine, laughed a lot, and returned with no mishaps. Phew!
By now it was about 3:30 in the morning, but I was feeling surprisingly well! There was so much around to engage my brain so the fatigue hadn't gotten to me yet. Our guide chose a few people do to a little skit for us about Lot and his wife getting turned into a pillar of salt since we were near Sodom, and April was one of them! It was great!
After the skit we piled back onto the bus and headed back to Jerusalem. I think almost everyone passed out on the drive. We got back to Jerusalem about 6am, got home about 6:15 or 6:20 and headed straight for bed! The next day (or rather the same day, just later on after we woke up) we felt like zombies, I choked and spit my coffee all over myself, dropped egg yoke all over myself and the floor, Skye was feeling very slap happy, and Katherine and I were whining because we didn't want April to leave back for the states that night.
Regardless of our odd zombie behavior, it was an amazing experience! It just felt so crazy to be in this enormous desert in the middle of the night playing with powdered rock and peeing in ravines. It was fantastic, I'm so glad we went!
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| Pretty powdery rock layers |
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| Katherine, April and me |
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| Rock layers. The guide said the swirls may have been caused by an earthquake. |
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| Wadi walls and the moon |
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| Wadi Pratzim |
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| There is brush here and there, but it's few and far between |
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| April! This is what happens when you lean against powdery wadi walls |
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| Wadi walk |
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| Eric and Skye were the readers! |
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| Skye and me in the wadi |
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| The cave in the wadi |
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| This is where we climbed out of the wadi. So powdery! |
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| Skye, Emmanuel, and Eric at the bon fire |
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| Skit group! April is second from the right |
