Winter Travels part 1: Turkey, Israel, Jordan

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About a month and a half ago, on December 12, I finished my internship in Germany. Since then, I’ve been travelling basically the whole time, but I haven’t had my laptop with me until recently so I have quite a bit to catch up on. When I finished my internship, I had flights already booked to Istanbul for a few days, then Israel to meet up with my family for 2 weeks, and then Budapest for new years with some friends. Beyond that, I had no plan other than to end up in Madrid a few weeks later, where my girlfriend at the time was living (then we broke up, so the adventure has been extended a bit longer until I figure out where to go instead). This post will cover the first 3 countries that I visited, and my next post(s) will catch up the rest of the way.

Turkey

Two days after the end of my internship, I flew to Istanbul. I was headed towards Israel to meet up with my family, and Istanbul was right on the way so it seemed like a fun place to stop for a few days. Unfortunately I ended up spending about half of my visit in the airport trying to get my lost luggage back, but the rest of the time was a good experience. I couchsurfed there with an old mining engineering professor, Orhan Kural, who is apparently famous in Turkey. He was a nice guy and had travelled to essentially every country in the world, but was also so busy that he barely had any time to tell me about his adventures. He was very nice though and provided me with a free bed, a bit of food, and everything I needed for the 2 nights I was staying there.

When I wasn’t at the airport trying to get my bag back (which took 13 days by the way, never ever ever ever fly with Onur Air), I walked all over the city. I saw the famous blue mosque, the palace which used to be the headquarters of the Ottoman empire, a couple of markets, and took a ferry across the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia. The blue mosque was nice, although I personally didn’t find it quite as thrilling as the hordes of tourists with selfie sticks did. But maybe that’s just because I’m not quite as excited by cities and buildings as I am by nature and mountains. I didn’t go inside the palace because it was ridiculously expensive, but the outside was pretty. There was one area where they dressed people up in sultan king costumes and took photos. The guy taking the photos conned me into letting him take a couple of me.

King of the castle

Then, when I went to the cash register to look at my photos and decide whether to buy one, the guy working there turned out to be a super nice dude and loved the fact that I was travelling and couchsurfing because he often hosts couchsurfers, so he gave me a bunch of the photos for free. Really nice people like this seem to be quite common in Turkey (apart from the airline workers)—I met several other similarly friendly and incredibly hospitable people who went way out of their way to help me find the place I was couchsurfing, help me get my bag back, and give me advice on what to do. I’d love to hitchhike and backpack all over the country at some point if that doesn’t become too sketchy to do as an American Jew.

Other notable things I saw/did in Istanbul include eating terrible döner kebabs, a bunch of markets—for food and pets—and riding a boat to Asia. I was really surprised at how bad the döner kebabs were compared to Germany. I had always been told that the German döner is way better, but since it is almost always made by Turkish people in Germany, I never believed it. Well, it’s true. I hate to say it but the döner in Istanbul was dry, tasteless, expensive, and generally just worse in every way than Germany. I even ate 3 döner kebabs because I thought I had just gotten a bad one, but they were all the same. So my advice is, eat döner in Germany and stick with baklava in Turkey. I also went to several markets, many of which were essentially the same, all selling spices, Turkish delight candies, and other food to go.  But there was one unique market, the pet market. It was a really terrible place from an animal cruelty standpoint, but interesting because I had never seen anything like it before. They had a bunch of stands with thousands of birds, rabbits, mice, lizards, fish, and even a few puppies and kittens pent up in little cages. I felt horrible for the puppies and it was really difficult to resist rescuing one. On my last day in Istanbul, I took a boat to Asia since I was flying out of the airport on the Asian side. Istanbul is divided by a big waterway, which is the official border between Asia and Europe, and it is kind of fun to take a ferry just to say you rode a boat to another continent. Unfortunately it was so smoggy outside that I couldn’t see much, and I don’t have any photos because my camera was lost in my luggage. After that I got a bus directly to the airport and headed to Israel.

Israel & Jordan

                My family all met up in Israel for a few weeks during my dad’s winter break, and we also went to Petra in Jordan. It was my second time in Israel and Jordan, having first gone there on a birthright trip 3 years ago. I arrived in Tel Aviv and my sister picked me up from the airport. She is currently teaching English for the school year in Netanya, Israel, which is a city on the coast just north of Tel Aviv. It was really late so we didn’t do anything that night, but the next day we went down to the beach and rented kayaks. We had a nice adventure kayaking around the Mediterranean, and I also bought some clothes since I still had no bag. We went to an interesting Shabbat party that evening at an army base, where everybody was completely sober but dancing crazier than most drunk people I’ve ever seen. After the party we went to a chocolate restaurant with Caitlin’s friend Dan and ate a healthy dinner of chocolate pizza (yes, it exists), which consists of dough covered with chocolate and marshmallows. The next day we explored Tel Aviv a little bit and then my parents arrived. They rented a car and we drove up to Tiberias, a city on the Sea of Galilee, which is where Jesus apparently decided physics is bullshit and walked on water.

                We went on a walk around a nature reserve in the north right by the border of Lebanon, where we saw a nice waterfall, and the next day we drove to Tsfat and Haifa. Tsfat has a big market area and a few ancient synagogues and Haifa has huge beautiful gardens overlooking the sea, and we ate a non-kosher dinner in the German quarter (it’s really hard to find non-kosher food in Israel). The next day we drove to Ein Gedi Kibbutz on the Dead Sea, which was a really amazing place. Kibbutzes used to be sort of socialist settlements where everyone in the community would work together to grow food and maintain the community, but now they are more often just businesses with nice hotels for tourists to stay in. We went on a hike through the oasis at Ein Gedi, passing by some cool animals like the Rock Hyrax and Ibex.

Rock Hyrax

Selfie with an Ibex

In the afternoon we went swimming. The water is about 10 times as salty as the ocean, and the dissolved salt makes it really dense so it is much more buoyant than normal water. When standing upright without touching the bottom, I would float with my shoulders completely out of the water. Dead Sea mud contains lots of minerals which are supposed to be really good for your skin, so we covered ourselves in mud, let it dry, and washed it off in the water. The results were amazing—my skin has never felt so soft.

Dead sea mud

After the Dead Sea we drove down to Eilat, on the southern tip of Israel, with a stop at Masada on the way. Masada is a mountain next to the Dead Sea with a long history of Jewish-Roman conflict. I hiked up the mountain while everyone else took the cable car. The hike began at the lowest point on Earth, around 1300 feet below sea level, and barely made it above sea level at the top of the mountain. At the top of Masada there are ancient ruins where Jews used to live until they were invaded by the Romans. When the Romans broke down their walls, the Jews, not wanting to live as slaves, committed one of the largest mass suicides in history.

The next day in Eilat was an amazing day for me, as it was my first time scuba diving around a coral reef. Israel has a small strip of coastline (about 6 miles) on the Red Sea, an extension of the Indian Ocean that is well known for its scuba diving opportunities. I did two dives, one 60 feet deep and one 10-25 feet deep at an area called the Japanese Gardens in Eilat. I thought the shallower dive was more interesting because there was more coral and fish. It was inside a nature reserve which was not accessible by land, we had to take a boat to the outside of the reserve and then swim in. A lot of the coral was dead, which has apparently happened in the last 10 years due to pollution and disturbance of the water by nearby developments. But there were a couple areas which were teeming with life, and they were amazing. Entire boulders seemed to breathe as the coral covering them expanded and contracted with colorful fish swimming everywhere. The crystal clear water made the experience even more amazing, being able to see well over 50 feet in any direction.

                After Eilat, we went to Petra for a day. Petra is a site of ancient ruins in the desert of Jordan. The Nabateans, who lived about 2000 years ago, carved their civilization into the sides of mountains, with incredibly intricate and impressively huge designs. The entrance to the park is shown in the third (?) Indiana Jones movie—a giant slot canyon with 150+ foot walls which then opens up to the treasury, an enormous building carved into a cliff, hundreds of feet tall.

The Treasury

Much of the rest of the park contains smaller tombs and cave dwellings where people lived, all carved into mountains in an incredible maze-like formation with tiny staircases that wind up and down the rocks and canyons of the rugged landscape. My photos only show a tiny fraction of the park, one could spend many days exploring the area and still never see everything hidden in the rocks.

Petra

                The final stop on our journey was Jerusalem. We drove 5 hours through the Israeli desert to get to the city, stopping at the Tel Aviv airport on the way where I finally got my backpack back that had been lost in Turkey!!!

 

A road sign on the drive from Eilat to Jerusalem

                In Jerusalem, we hired a tour guide give us a private tour of the old city. He knew everything about everything, and was a great guy to lead a tour. He told us all about the history of the city, from the Jews that settled there many thousands of years ago until now. Unfortunately whatever had made its way into my digestive system put a bit of a damper on things since I had to sprint to a toilet every 20 minutes and shit my brains out, but otherwise it was a really interesting day.

Jerusalem

                Israel was an interesting place to visit because people are so friendly and live such normal lives, while much of the rest of the world thinks that Israelis are all war-loving racists. In Germany whenever I would tell people that I was going to Israel, I got the same exact reaction every time “vhat zee fahck! Vhy vhould you go zhere? Don’t you know it is dangerous?” It’s really sad because all that the Europeans know about Israel is what they hear in the news, which basically shows only the kill count for the war and nothing else. They don’t understand why the war was happening, they don’t understand the long history of conflict and a need for at least one Jewish state somewhere in the world if there are going to be so many Islamic and Christian countries, they don’t understand that Israelis didn’t take the land from Palestine, the country was created by the UN after World War II, they don’t understand that it is a perfectly safe and really beautiful place to visit and that the people who live there are just normal people.

That’s all for now, in a day or two I’ll probably get another post written about Budapest, Croatia, Bosnia, and the rest.