Monday 7/3/06 – Masada, camel rides and Eilat – Day 8

Masada is a mountain, a fortress, and an inspirational story of resistance.  On top of the mountain, King Herod built a fortress.  Inside the walls of the fortress, Herod built several pleasure palaces.  Since no pleasure palace of King Herod’s time is complete without numerous bathhouses, Herod built these too.  And since bathhouses require water, and water is hard to get in large quantities on desert mountain tops, Herod built a system of aqueducts and cisterns to bring water to his mountain and to store it.  Being hard to get to in the extreme, after Herod’s death his palaces at Masada were not used, until the Jewish War in betwen 66-73 C.E. between the Jews and the Romans.  After Jerusalem fell, some Jewish Zealots and their families took up residence there.  They used it as a base to harass the Romans, and the Romans decided to take it out.  In order to do this, they had to build an enormous ramp so that they could bring their battering rams up to the wall of the fortress and knock it down.  It took months, but eventually the Romans broke through the wall.  But when they entered the fortress expecting to slaughter the men and carry the women off into slavery, what they found surprised them.  The entire Zealot community, close to a 1000 people, had committed suicide.  The head of each family had killed their family, and then ten men had killed all the other men, and then they drew lots to choose one man who would kill the others and then commit suicide.  It sounds fantastic, but they have found the lots that were used.

Ever since I had told the boys that I had climbed up the snake path before dawn and watched the sun rise from the top of Masada in 1976, they have wanted to do that too.  At first the travel agent had told me that we couldn’t do it, that we had to take the cable car up with everyone else.  But when we got to the Dead Sea, it turned out that about half the group wanted to hike up, and arrangements were made to accommodate us.  In July, you need to climb up before sunrise, because after sunrise, it is too bloody hot!

So, at 3:30 am, Marc woke up.  We had placed a wakeup call for 4 am, but Marc didn’t trust them, so he didn’t go back to sleep.  At 3:50, he was moving something and it clinked against something and I woke up – so clearly I was sleeping lightly too.  We got up and got dressed and I went to get the kids.  I woke them by dressing them.  I went back to our room to put the suitcases by mom and dad’s room.  Later, Jonathan said that my dressing him must not have woke him at all, because when he first woke up, he was surprised to find himself in his clothes.  We got down to the bus around 4:35 – only 5 minutes late. Marc stopped to complain about service – first, it took 4 requests to get Benjamin’s bed made and then we never got our wake up call.  It took awhile before we left and we didn’t arrive at Masada until 5:10.  We gathered up the breakfast boxes that the hotel made for me and we started climbing.  We told the boys they didn’t have to wait for us.

It took Jonathan about 50 minutes to climb Masada, it took Benjamin about 55 minutes, it took me about 65 minutes and it took Marc about 70 minutes.  Sunrise was at 5:45, so all of us were at various places on snake path when it rose.  It didn’t matter. 

You could see it just fine from the path.  It was pretty inspiring too.  I thought about the Zealots standing where I was standing and watching the sunrise 2000 years ago.  When we all gathered at the top, we relaxed and explored the breakfast boxes, which turned out to contain several different pieces of fruit, cucumber and cheese sandwiches and juice and water, which did not go over big with the boys, but they didn’t complain.  We had a two-hour wait until the rest of the group was due to show up via cable car.  Jonathan decided to play DS and Benjamin headed off towards the bathrooms.  I decided to follow him, which turned out to be a good thing because he couldn’t find them.  After he was done, I asked him if he wanted to explore, which he did.  We looked around some of the stuff around the south end including a mikvah.  The fortress at the top of Masada is surrounded by a double wall with a 10-15 ft space between the walls.  This space is divided into rooms, called casement rooms.  In the picture on the left, Benjamin is standing on the inner wall (which originally was much higher.)  The building on the right was used by the Jews as a mikvah.

We found the southern cistern and went down into it.  There was a group of American kids down there and their guide had put on a beard and crown and cape and was pretending to be King Herod.  She was fun.  The kids had two Israelis with Uzis as escorts. 

We went up and walked along the casement walls.  I had read a book to the boys about Masada that talked extensively about one of the features that Herod built – three “hanging terraces” built into the cliff on the north point of the fortress.  Benjamin wanted to see them so we wandered around to the North.  We found the steps that went down to the middle and lower terraces and I said to Benjamin, “There are a lot of steps here and every step we go down we have to go back up.”  He said, “No we don’t - watch” and he went down 5 steps and came back up in two big steps, skipping steps 2 and 4.  I said, "Are you sure you want to go down to the lower terrace?  We could just go back and find Daddy.”   But he wanted to go down, so we went down.  He was ahead of me and after a few minutes he called up to me, “look, we found Daddy!”  I came around a bend and sure enough, there was Marc sitting on a step and writing.  At the lower terrace we found two young Israeli women doing reconstruction work on scaffolding.  All three of the pictures below were taken on the lower terrace.  The middle picture below was taken looking up at the middle and upper terrace. 

Then we went up, stopping at the middle terrace.  You aren’t allowed on the middle terrace, but I took the picture on the left.  The picture on the right is of the model of the three terraces.

The picture below left is from the upper terrace, looking down on the middle terrace.  A little bit of the lower terrace can be seen sticking out on the left.  The picture on the right is a model of the entire fortress.  The three “hanging terraces” are at the point in the lower left corner.

Benjamin was getting tired, so we headed for the entrance to wait for the tram.  It was another half hour before the tram arrived with the rest of the group, and Benjamin was done – he wanted to leave.  Fortunately for us, after out tour guide’s first talk, Natalie (the 5-year old) wanted to leave too, so we sent Benjamin down with her.  We saw a model of the aqueduct system that Herod built (which is now in ruins from the Romans and time.)  We walked around the upper terrace and saw the storerooms and a roman bath just like those we had seen at Beit Shean.  The group did not go down to the lower terrace, so I was really glad Benjamin and I had done that earlier.  Then we saw the room where the lots were found and the stable that was turned into a synagogue.  Next we saw the Roman road and where the wall was broken – I didn’t realize it was the road at first – It just seemed like a lot of dirt.  That was pretty much the end of the Masada tour – they skipped the whole southern end.  So I was really glad I had gone into the cistern with Benjamin, because I would have been disappointed to miss it.

The picture on the left shows a reconstructed palace wall so you can imagine what the wall originally looked like.  The black line is the height of the wall before they built it back up to its original height.  The picture on the right is the model of the aqueduct system.  Aqueducts funneled water from flash floods into cisterns cut into the mountain far below the fortress, and then slaves and donkeys carried the water up to cisterns at the mountain top.   

A room, a doorway and a bathhouse. (How many other words contain two consecutive “h”s?)

We took the cable car down and saw a short movie about Masada and I wondered how comprehensible the movie would be to someone who knew nothing about Masada.  Next we got on the bus for the long trip to Eilat.  We had taken a seat near the front because Benjamin had been having trouble with bus sickness, but because we had had that seat the previous day, we got booted.  Benjamin ended up in the last seat on the bus – and Marc and I ended up in the seats in front of him.  The drive was long and the bus was very hot.  The tour planned to stop for lunch and a camel ride on the way down to Eilat.  About half an hour before the stop, I was up front asking about the possibilities of getting the kids in with Don and Sue to swim with dolphins.  After about 15 minutes, Marc waved me back.  Benjamin was sitting next to him in the seat I had vacated holding a plastic bag into which he had just finished throwing up.  So I went back up and asked the Rabbi how long before the next stop because my son was throwing up in the back.  I was told 10 minutes.  So I stood for the rest of the way because I wasn’t willing to crawl back into Benjamin’s seat, and I certainly wasn’t willing to move Benjamin!  The camel ride was uncomfortable, but I expected that.  Benjamin lost his hat, but we got it back.  The boys loved it.  The picture on the left was taken just as the camel had started to stand up, so the camel’s knees are still on the ground, but his (her?) back legs are straight, which is why they look like if they weren’t in a saddle, they would be sliding to the camel’s neck.  In the picture on the right, you can see the people who passed on the camel ride – a wise move, in my opinion – camel rides are for kids!

Afterward we had Bedouin lunch in a Bedouin tent; sitting on “pillows” on the floor (except the older generation, who got tables and chairs.)  The picture on the left shows the boys lying on “pillows” (more like mattresses, if you ask me) and the picture on the right shows a Bedouin grinding coffee.

First we waited for a looong time.  Then we got a loooong talk about what the Bedouin lifestyle was like.  Finally, they got around to lunch.  First they served tea, which was super-sweet so I liked it.  Then coffee, which was awful.  Then chicken and goat and pitas and humus and eggplant and a bunch of other salads and lemonade.  It was really good and as usual I ate too much.  Baklava for desert.  Then back on the bus and on to Eilat.  I sat with Benjamin and did logic puzzles and Marc sat with Jonathan.  We arrived just before 6, settled in and went to the pool.  When the pool closed at 7, we changed and went to dinner.  Benjamin had found a place in a guidebook that he wanted to try.  But when we got there, Jonathan couldn’t find anything he would eat.  So we went on.  A couple of places later served hot dogs.  But Benjamin was fixated on the place from the guidebook and couldn’t find anything he was willing to eat here.  I was very hungry and tired, Benjamin was on the verge of tears, and I couldn’t see going to a dozen more places to find one where both boys would eat.  So I proposed splitting – I would take Benjamin to his restaurant and Marc would take Jonathan to his.  So we did.  It was nice one-on-one time for each of us with one child.  Benjamin and I finished first and I didn’t even wait for Marc and Jonathan to finish, I just took Benjamin home and put him to bed.

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