The Ramon Crater

Or more accurately, מכתש רמון. I'm back from tiyul in the Negev. I will spare you the geological definition of a machtesh, but if you are interested here is wikipedia's entry on the Ramon Crater: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Crater. One thing that should be noted is that it is not a crater, but rather a huge depression caused by millions of years of erosion and plate tectonics.

We left Haifa at 6 AM, but the trip didn't really begin until a breakfast stop in Be'er Sheva. We walked into an open air market, bought hummus and lafa bread and sat down on the side of the road to eat. There wasn't much remarkable about the stop. We did see Ben Gurion University and the Soroka hospital from the bus, but otherwise there was very little to see. I did get into an argument with a Druze guy in the market, who wanted to know how much it would cost to buy Lina (second from the left, above.)

Once we had left any semblance of civilization behind, we stopped at the Ovdat archaeological site, about 40 minutes south of Sde Boker. The site is the ruins of an ancient Nabatean city in the middle of the desert. The Nabateans were a Roman - era people who made their livings by carting Indian spices across the Arabian Peninsula, through Petra and then crossing the Negev to the port of Gaza, where they sold the goods to waiting Roman and Greek patrons. This became known as the "Spice Route." What keyed their success was their ability to survive the trek across the desert. They accomplished this through shrewd water conservation and collection, and desert cities and camps like Ovdat.

We did a relatively short 2 and a half hour hike that afternoon, going down into the crater and walking to our campsite at a Beduin tent. From there we spent the next 3 hours cooking our dinner, eating, and then talking around the campfire. As hot as it gets in the desert during the day, it gets very cold at night, so the fire was extremely welcome. That night it was very difficult to sleep because an Israeli family was staying in the tent as well, and they were miserably loud and obnoxious all night. Needless to say the dinner and conversation was more memorable than sleeping in the tent.

Yesterday we left for the long hike: 9 hours through the desert. Here is the basic route we took; Leaving camp, we walked up a winding pass through one of the mountains in the machtesh. Once we reached the top, we followed the path along a ridge of the mountain for a while, before turning back down into one of the wadi's (a dry riverbed.) We walked through the wadi until we reached the point at which several of the wadi's come together and then followed another. The hike ended with another trek up the highest mountain inside the machtesh, where we got the most spectacular view of all of the surrounding area. Not that my photos do justice to the incredible natural beauty of the desert, but I'll close this post with a selection of other photos that are fairly representative of the hike.