Desert Adventures Part 1: Shkedi’s Camplodge and a Crazy Desert Rave

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           It’s been a while since my last post so I have quite a lot to catch up on. The last month and a half have been the craziest yet and my broken laptop screen got so bad that I could no longer see anything, which gave me two reasons to put off writing until now. But now, as I sit on a plane, reflecting on my last year as I head back to the US, I feel inspired to catch up on what I’ve been putting off.

            I wrote my last post just after returning from a trip to Palestine. Since then, I’ve been on a hitchhiking and desert hiking adventure near the Dead Sea, to a crazy nature party in the middle of nowhere in the desert, finished working at the hostel in Tel Aviv, camped in the desert for two weeks to set up for and then attend Midburn--Israel’s Burning Man event, got my advanced scuba diving certification in the Red Sea in Egypt, climbed up and rappelled down 100ft trees in Oxford, England, tried and failed to acquire a taste for Guinness in Ireland but had a great time doing so with two close college friends, Ryan and Kasey, and an amazing German girl, Alina, and then cancelled my plans for Lisbon and ran off to Madrid with Alina for an incredible couple of days before making my way back to the States with an overnight stop on a mid-Atlantic island on the way. So, here is the first of several posts that will cover what I did, what I learned, and how I felt throughout these crazy 6ish weeks.

Tel Aviv Beach, my home for a month

            I’ll do it in chronological order. The first adventure since my last post was Neot Hakikar, a tiny village right on the Jordanian border that is home to Shkedi’s Camplodge, one of the coolest hostels I’ve ever been to. It was pretty empty, as their high season is winter in the Dead Sea region (it gets too hot to bear during the summer at 1400 feet below sea level), but the place was amazing. The camp had several open-air huts filled with mattresses on the ground, all surrounding a big central area with a huge fire pit surrounded by couches inside a geodesic dome. Very hippie, and very good vibes.

the dome at Shkedi's Camplodge

            The staff gave me a free stay since I was working at another Israeli hostel, and I mostly hung out with them for the evening. With the stars and moon bright overhead, we decided to venture out into the desert, a crazy landscape comprised of maze-like canyons carved into a large semi-rounded mud plateau. We climbed up onto the plateau and gazed at the stars, talking about everything from politics to existentialism to extraterrestrial life. I didn’t have a watch on me, but I’d venture a guess that the time was around 4:20.

            The next morning I woke up and went back up to the plateau to explore what I couldn’t see the night before. I climbed through canyons made of crumbling mud up to the highest point, where I found a nice spot to sit, meditate, and reflect. Neot Hakikar is a magical place, a tiny village of somewhere around 100 people where everyone works together and everyone gets along.

the crazy landscape of the Arava

shameless selfie on the plateau

           

            I had to get back to Tel Aviv that evening for work and wanted to stop at the Dead Sea for a swim along the way, but wasn’t willing to pay the bus fare, so I grabbed my bag and asked the camplodge staff where to hitchhike from. The guy working told me that there is a really nice spring with a little natural pool about 3km away and he offered to drive me there and I could hitchhike from there after a quick dip. So I went to the spring, and, since nobody was around, stripped down and got in naked. It was a beautiful place, a little oasis in the desert surrounded by palm trees, and it was just me and the tadpoles.

a friend I made at the spring

Hidden spring, an oasis in the desert 

couldn't go much further past the spring though

            After a short freshwater swim, I walked down the road to an intersection where I could hitchhike to the Dead Sea. Israel is a great place to hitch rides because it has such a large hippie and traveler community. There are always people willing to pick up a hitchhiker, especially near small villages. The first vehicle to stop was already packed to the brim with Palestinian construction workers but they waved me in and somehow I crammed into the cab of a tiny pickup truck with 4 others who didn’t know a word of English. It was only about ten minutes before they turned the other direction though, so I got out and waited for my next ride at the next big intersection. It was really hot and intensely sunny that day and I had forgotten my hat in the last vehicle, so I quickly got fed up with waiting. After about ten minutes I decided to just stand in the middle of the road and walk up to cars that stopped at the stop sign and ask for a ride to the Dead Sea. If you’re ever stranded and hitchhiking, I highly recommend this method, as it is very effective. The first car I asked was a couple of old Israeli guys going to the same beach that I wanted to go to, and upon hearing my American accent when I said the one sentence that I know in Hebrew (“Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew”), they decided that I was safe and waved me in. One of the guys in the car had lived in the US for several years so he was very excited to pick up an American.

            They took me to the beach in Ein Bokek where I unfortunately had to wear a swimsuit this time. I got in the bathtub-temperature water and immediately my legs floated out from under me thanks to the buoyancy caused by salinity ten times that of the ocean. If you swim and you’ve never been to the Dead Sea, you have to check it out. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t push my body further underwater. With my body positioned straight upright in water deeper than my head, I floated with my shoulders completely out of the water. After 20 minutes of reading my book while floating, I felt like I was turning into a raisin and got out and rinsed off.

some light reading 

            My next stop was Jerusalem to meet my sister and a Grinnell friend for dinner, so I waited by the gate to the beach resort area and asked everyone who stopped there if I could have a ride to Jerusalem. After about ten no’s, two Palestinian guys waved me in. They were super nice guys but spoke terrible English so the whole ride they were talking to me in half-English half-Arabic. I almost could not understand a single word over the wind coming through the windows, the sound of passing cars, and the screechy Arabic music that they were playing on full blast through the staticky speakers, coupled with their thick accents and lack of basic English vocabulary. The few things I did understand included that the singer of the song playing was 16 years old and the driver really wanted to marry her, and that they really like Allah. It was difficult to ask them about religion because of the language barrier, but I think they told me that they believe Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have the same God, so Israel is all of their land and it should be shared peacefully. They went on to tell me how Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and the rest of the Arab Middle East dislike Palestine and think of Palestinians as the lowest-class Arabs. “But everyone welcome in Palestine. You Isaac, you Mohammad, you always welcome.” These guys had big hearts, their only problem was that I couldn't really understand them. 

            And then he spent ten minutes telling me about a man named Lude. I think Lude lives in the mountains and has some sort of connection to the Dead Sea and Allah, but that’s all I could understand. I’m not sure what Lude has to do with anything else we talked about, but it seemed like an interesting story nonetheless. I quickly gave up on asking “what?” when I didn’t understand something (it was hopeless), and literally think I said “yeah” and “ok” over a thousand times each by the end of the ride. Finally they dropped me off in Jerusalem exactly where I needed to go, making the past 2 hours of struggling and not understanding all worth it. Later that night I headed back to Tel Aviv for a couple days of beach and work before going back to the desert for my first experience at one of Israel's legendary psytrance nature parties.

Desert Rave

            This was one of the most insane parties I’ve ever witnessed. I got a ride with some random guys from the Facebook group three hours out into the middle of the desert to the secluded spot where the party would take place. Somebody had trucked giant speakers and tents and a food/drink stand down the sand path way out into the desert, complete with microphones for the multiple didgeridoos. Due to some trouble with the police, the DJ’s didn’t start playing until around 4:30am and continued for a straight 12 hours until 4:30pm the next day. Nobody slept, just danced. Psytrance is a really popular genre of music in Israel, and after that party I completely understand why. I never liked it too much when I listened to it on my computer, but being at a psytrance party way out in the desert was completely different. The people, the dancing, the openness, the costumes, and the crazy sounds all seemed to fit perfectly together to create the best possible energy. I learned to hula-hoop there, which was pretty exciting, and I saw a man wearing a frog suit that was so amazingly realistic that I literally thought he was a giant frog. After 12 hours of dancing with only a few breaks to go explore the colors in the monochrome desert landscape, roll around in the sand and become one with the desert, and drink about 10 liters of water, I was wiped out and ready to sleep. I found a ride back to Tel Aviv and passed out for a solid 16 hours, possibly the longest anyone has ever slept in a shitty hostel bunk bed.

A tree that provided shade in the desert, which I felt a very strong connection with

            The next week was my last week working at the hostel, and soon enough I was heading back to the desert for Midburn. I’ll spare you the reading (and myself the writing) for now though, and that’ll be in my next post.