Sailing today


It's 8am and I am just about to go down to the docks to find my ship. I decided to travel up to Haifa yesterday rather than stay in Jaffa and rush everything this morning, and that gave me the chance to wander round the city a little. Besides, my dorm in Jaffa was like an oven. I ended up sleeping on the roof.

After Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Haifa is pretty low key but it is pleasant enough. It has a German Colony, just like Jerusalem, and there is an enormous Bahai shrine and some gardens leading down to the city centre. You can visit the gardens but only as part of a tour so I went to down to have one last afternoon on an Israeli beach instead.


Thursday afternoon is the busiest time of the weeks to travel as all the soldiers leave their barracks to go home for the weekend. So the train that runs down the coast here (and eventually on to Tel Aviv) was full of those uniformed kids with guns that has become such a normal sight here. It will be strange to get to a country where carrying a semi-automatic weapon in the street is not something most people do.

Last night four of us from the hostel here went out for a final-night beer or two in a bar that had a great Jewish/Arab mix - the first time I had really seen that working in Israel and a very good farewell to a country whose joys and challenges I've been very privileged to share very slightly in this summer. It has been an eye-opening experience and I'll miss Israel's unique brand of craziness.

But in the meantime, I've got my bag, my book and some sea sick tablets (just in case - I don't think these ships have stabilisers) and it's time for me to, er, embark. I'm guessing there won't be internet or mobile reception at sea, so see you in three days and Athens, here we come.

A Jaffa photo gallery



I guess this is the first day of my journey home. I stayed last night with my friends Ben and Avi in Jerusalem, packed up my stuff, dropped into the yeshiva to say goodbye and caught the little minibus to Tel Aviv. It was sad seeing the familiar sights of the city disappearing behind me but the melancholy was tempered somewhat by the most irascible driver I had ever encountered - and in Israel that's saying something.


He yelled at us all to give him the ticket money as soon as we climbed aboard - usually it's done as a kind of graceful passing to and fro of notes and change up and down the van. He short changed an Arab woman and was deaf to our entreaties to give her the 10 shekels her owed her (in the end, almost at Tel Aviv, he relented). And, in between sitting loudly and constantly on the horn, he made numerous, high-volume calls on his mobile. Eventually a man sitting at the front, who I had taken to be an American tourist (he was reading Patricia Cornwell's 'The Book of the Dead') barked at him in perfect Hebrew to shut up and drive properly. And then he was as quiet as a puppy.


I have booked into a backpaker hostel in Jaffa rather than Tel Aviv itself. It's more mellow here and relaxed and away from the sometimes frantic partying of the city. There's a lovely roof terrace (below) where I am now, which, until about 30 seconds ago, was an oasis of calm. Then an Israeli guy, oblivious to the fact that I was writing my blog, insisted on talking. And, when he found out the type of yeshiva I had been studying at, he started berating me loudly about it (he was an Orthodox Jew). He was particularly upset that women and men prayed together and said my father would be ashamed of me. At that point, luckily, my Hebrew ran out, though an expletive or two would have come in handy.


I am here till early Friday morning when I go up to Haifa for my boat. Opposite the hostel is a huge flea market, which will be good to explore tomorrow, and just round the corner is Israel's most famous bakery (run by an Arab family and open 24 hours) and a restuarant called Dr Shakshuka, which is also renowned for its cheap and good Middle Eastern food. So I guess I could eat my way through the next 48 hours.



In the meantime, these are just some pictures from a little walk I took this evening (the cat was obviously away when they handed out nice coat colours).

A Jerusalem moment

I had forgotten how barmy this city can be and what gets taken as normal here. I was walking past the end of the road where the prime minister lives yesterday and there seemed to be an unusual amount of activity. There were more armed policemen on the corners than there normally are and others sitting in cars with their lights flashing.

Then a man going the other way on the pavement stopped me and said, '[INAUDIBLE] is coming.' I couldn't work out who he was talking about but I looked back at the police cars, expecting to see some sort of diplomatic cortege pull up, and said, 'Oh, when?'

'Soon, brother, soon,' he replied. 'In our generation. I feel it.'

And I realised he was talking about the Messiah.

A slight change of plan


A couple of days ago I was walking along the Dahab seafront when two Arab boys in the water called out, 'Mister, come!' pointing to the sea bed. 'A snake of the sea! A snake of the sea!' The water was only about 5ft deep so I splashed in and indeed there was a lovely grey/brown sea snake weaving in and out of the stones. They leant me their mask and we watched it for a few minutes and chatted for a bit until I said goodbye and carried on to the cafe I was heading for.


Now I am back in Jerusalem, it's moments like that that have stuck in my mind. There's a sign on one of the Dahab bars that says, 'Come as a guest, leave as a friend' and really that should be the motto of the town. On my last morning there, as I was walking one last time along the sea front, people came out of the cafes where they worked to say hello. And when they discovered that I was going they said, I think with all sincerity, that they hoped I would be back very soon. And I think I will.


I took a morning bus again up the coast to Taba and noticed for the first time some interesting little places to stay north of Nuweibah. Simmy had emailed me earlier about his Dahab experiences in the early 1980s, when he stayed in straw shacks on the beach and ate at just 'one little cafe'. And I was a little envious Dahab wasn't like that now (though the dismally unreliable water supply in my hotel room's ensuite bathroom did give it a slightly desert flavour). But here, suddenly, was the Simmy experience just an hour or so north - straw huts looking straight out on to an sapphire blue sea (blurry picture below) - and it looked magical. There were little dive sites dotted along the coast. And I am sure there must be that one little cafe somewhere. So next time, who knows, maybe we could get some friends together and stay a little more in the wild. And if it isn't too much of a cliche someone could even bring a guitar...


This week sees the start of my journey back home. I had originally planned to travel a little in the north of Israel before heading to Haifa next Monday to catch a cargo ship sailing to Piraeus. But yesterday I had a call from the shipping agent to say that my sailing had been cancelled and offering me a place on a boat that leaves on Friday instead. So now I am spending a couple of days here saying goodbye to friends and packing up my stuff before going north and then into a new world of commercial shipping. I think I am going to get to Haifa on Thursday so I can work out where the docks are (the ship sails on Friday morning) and where I need to go. I have a reservation but no ticket. I am pretty sure that the ship will be there. And I am guessing there isn't going to be a departure lounge with duty free and a Costa Cofee. But who knows?

Dahab, Egypt


I left Jerusalem at 7am on a bus bound for Eilat. Somehow I had imagined it would be a peaceful journey through the Negev. Maybe I could catch up on some reading, have a doze, listen to my iPod. What I didn't count on was the mass of teenage girls who were also heading south for sun, sea and whatever the Middle Eastern equivalent of sangria is. Even at that hour they were revved up to an incredible level of excitement - and Israeli teenagers probably beat all other teenagers hands-down when it comes to sheer volume. There were screams, shouts, laughter, songs, clapping, running up and down the bus borrowing make-up and sharing crisps and, a little scarily I thought, considering we were travelling at 70mph down a motorway, multiple attempts to ingratiate themselves with the driver by offering him sweets. I did need my iPod in the end but only to use the headphones as earplugs.

I lost them, at last, when we got to Eilat, Israel's premier resort in the sun, and realised the place was just perfect for them. There are probably nice parts of the city, but they aren't obvious from the route into the bus station. Instead it's more like a kind of sub-Benidorm with sweltering heat, kosher food and no Brits. After the mellowness of Jerusalem, the gangs of shirtless kids (no one seemed to be over 15), roaming the streets and peeling in the near-Saharan sun, looked like extras in some badly thought-out cross between 'High School Musical' and 'Mad Max'. It was a relief to catch the little local bus to the Egyptian border.


After the madness of Eilat, the tiny town of Taba, where Israel has a crossing into Egypt, was an oasis of calm. Almost literally in fact, as it is pretty much surrounded by desert. I had expected the chaos, hold-ups and total confusion of the Allenby Bridge border I had come through into Israel, but, apart from one or two people pootling around the duty-free (which you have no choice but to go through after passport control - who says Jews don't make good businessmen?), I was the only person there. After a cursory glance at my passport from the Israeli army immigration woman and the security guy at the gate asking me if I had my gun with me, I walked about 50 yards through what I guess is no man's land and into a large, shabby, marble-floored 'Arrivals Hall' that was the entry point into Egypt. And here was what I have come to realise is a very familiar sight in the Arab Middle East: 20 or so slightly sweaty men in various uniforms lolling around doing pretty much nothing and looking bored. I managed to get one of them to give me a visa, got my passport stamped and strolled out into the country that was once Israel's bitterest enemy.


I was determined to get a bus to Dahab, about 150km down the coast, rather than take a cab, which I had heard would be nonsensically expensive, but I wasn't totally convinced there would be one and the bus station was a fair walk down the road. So I was ready for the usual hoard of taxi drivers just outside the border crossing gates shouting for business, swearing on their lives that the bus had been cancelled or the bus station had burnt down or something and otherwise persuading you that there was no alternative to paying through the nose for a ride in their ancient Peugeot.

Instead, all was peace and quiet. Someone did look up from their mint tea and mumble "taxi" when I walked past but otherwise I was left to myself. Maybe nobody comes in this way any more. Or maybe it's the heat and they can't be bothered. And, after all that, there was a bus, so, after two and half diesel-fumed hours rumbling down the beautiful Red Sea coast - crystal clear blue water on one side, browny-goldy-grey desert on the other (plus at least five checkpoints where more bored, slightly sweaty men got on and pretended to check everybody's ID) - I arrived in Dahab.


As the Lonely Planet says, Dahab is indeed light years away from the little hippy village it was 10 years ago but the package tours haven't got here yet (they all go to Sharm El Sheikh further down the coast) and everything is low-rise little hotels, open-sided cafes right on the water's edge and some wonderfully hospitable and friendly people. Chatting to the various Mohammeds, Ahmeds and Abduls that punctuate your day - Egyptian women are hardly to be seen, apparently they are all back at home in Cairo or Alexandria - I couldn't help being reminded of a young Israeli man I met in Jerusalem who said something fantastically offensive about "all Arabs" (which, at the time, I was too timid/shocked/depressed to challenge) and wishing he could come here. But of course he can't and won't - I guess that's how conflict scars people - and certainly things go a little quiet here when I say I have just been living in Jerusalem.

I'm mostly here for the scuba diving, which I had heard was some of the best in the world, and now, two days and five dives in, I'm pretty blown away by it all. The water is almost travel-brochure transparent turquoise and the fish, none of whose names I can remember, swim around you in a wonderful kaleidoscope of colour. And - and anyone who has been diving will appreciate how important this is - the dive leaders are friendly, knowledgeable, skilled and calm (and handsome, too, which helps).


Today we went on a dive into what is known as the Blue Hole. [Skip to the next paragraph if you are already bored.] You swim down through a narrow channel between two rocks to emerge about 30m underwater into an enormous blue abyss. The sea goes down another 120m to the seabed and almost infinitely to your left - or at least until it gets to Saudi Arabia. And to your right is a huge wall of coral, stretching into the distance and swarming with fish. There was a little one that cleans your teeth if you let it. (I didn't - at that point I was finding the hugeness of it all a little unnerving and didn't want to take my air supply out of my mouth.). And another one that cleans your ears. (Ditto, though air supply less relevant.) But less weird and just as wonderful, you float weightlessly through great clouds of fish whose scales catch the sunlight coming down from the surface in flashes of red and green and gold. It's hard to describe diving and rereading this paragraph I realise my prose is heading in a dangerously ponsey direction, so I'll stop now and just say that the diving is great and I'm looking forward to more.


In the meantime, the rest of day ambles along from lazing in the sun to a juice by the sea's edge to a cheap meal (£3) in one of the little, formica-table restaurants in the main street (chicken, chicken or chicken, so far, but I might be a bit more adventurous tonight). I have a pile of rubbishy books (well, rubbishy-ish, I've just finished a PD James), some beach shorts and my suncream. I've met some nice people. The yeshiva seems far away. And there's wifi in the beach bars. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I might stay a little longer.

On the road again (and some old pics)


This is my last weekend in Jerusalem - or at least the last one in my flat. Term ended on Thursday (I've posted our Hebrew class end-of-term pic below, with me in my customary I-hate-having-my-picture-taken gawky pose) and since then I have been cleaning and packing and, because today is a special fast day, eating up what's left in my fridge. I can't really recommend lentil salad, tuna bake, pickled herring and yogurt washed down with tonic water but, hey, at least nothing went to waste.


The fast is held to commemorate a number of calamaties in Jewish history, most especially the days in 587BC and 70AD when the first and second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (by the Babylonians and the Romans respectively), the city was all but razed to the ground and the Jews were sent into exile. Jerusalem in those days was the crown of the Middle East and it had been the centre of Jewish life since 1000BC. To lose it must have been catastrophic and the book we read on this day - the Lamentations of Jeremiah - is a bleak description of palaces destroyed, men and women slaughtered in the street, people selling themselves for food and mothers eating their children. It's traditionally read to an unsurprisingly mournful chant, by low light, on the eve of the fast and last night we went to the Wailing Wall, the only part of the Temple that remains, to hear it and dwell on the destruction that overtook the Jewish people in those days.



Well, we went to part of the Wailing Wall. As men and women can't pray together at the main part of the Wall, which is controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, we gathered in a small area to the south where, if anything, the effect is even more palpable. (Veteran readers of this blog, if there are any, will remember that this was where I went for morning prayers in the first or second week of my time here.) You sit on the stones of an old Roman road that functioned as a shopping arcade next to one of the Temple entrances. (There are still little stone booths where the merchants kept their stock, just like the souks of many Middle Eastern cities today. I like to think this is where Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers, but I'm probably wrong). In front of you, the Wall rises up maybe 30 or 40 feet to the huge platform that is now the location of the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. And all around are enormous blocks of stone, some measuring four or five feet, which were thrown down into the street, and still lie exactly where they landed, during that second destruction in AD70.


It would be easy to find all of this too distant and historical. I have never really been one for archaeological sites and, to be honest, last night left me a little cold. But a picture I saw in this morning's paper, as I was walking to prayers at the yeshiva, put it all into a grim, more modern, context. It showed a man somewhere in Georgia or South Ossetia (I don't know the city, I'm afraid), his face twisted with despair, holding the body of another man killed in the conflict that has just erupted there. Around him, his city also lay in ruins and when I got to the yeshiva I looked again at the Book of Lamentations and found, sadly, that in the 2,500 years since it was written, very little seems to have changed.


Yet, for many Jews - cautiously, gently, delicately - there is also something celebratory about today. The exile that began in AD70, it could be argued, has now ended - in 1948, maybe, or 1967. And, today of all days, the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem is very much in the air. For many people, especially those on the right here, this fast day underlines the centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish identity. And it shows up how problematic the idea of dividing Jerusalem again really is. I can't think of many other places in the world that are so steeped in longing, rhetoric and significance - for Christians and Muslims, as well as for Jews. And I can't think of many other days in the year when you can feel the Jewish connection to this city so potently.


For me, leaving tomorrow morning on a bus to, of all places, Egypt, today has left me with a bittersweet set of feelings about Jerusalem. I long for a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict here and I think that will include a capital in East Jerusalem for the Palestinians. But I also feel a strong Jewish connection to a place that, for six weeks, has been a wonderful home. Here I have been, for want of a better word, more observant. I have been going to prayers more or less twice every day. I have been wearing my kippa most of the time. I have been discovered texts and had many discussions that have been both inspiring and challenging. And I have studied with, and made friends with, some remarkable people.



Yet I have also loved the summer nights here, with their gentle breeze that means you can leave all the windows open and ignore the air con. I'll miss the shwarmas and felafel in Ben Yehuda Street. I'll miss the gangs of American teenagers, here on subsidised trips from the States, discovering a kind of Judaism that is based as much on the bronzed and handsome men and women in the Israeli army as it is on Talmud and prayers in the synagogue. (Well, rather more, to be honest; I think many of them could probably skip the synagogue part altogether.) I'll miss the crazy, pedestrian-unfriendly traffic lights that take you halfway across a busy intersection and then leave you stranded on a little island in the middle. I'll miss the cats. And I'll miss the quiet of shabbat and the sounds of the muezzin calling out from the mosques in the east of the city. This is a place where, even if you are not religious, you feel religion. In traditional Judaism, this is where the Shechinah - the female, worldly attribute of God - still resides and, although, I don't totally subscribe to that idea, I will miss the way the geography here inspires in you something very spiritual. And I will have to find some way of carrying all of that with me back to London.



A clue to how to do that came on Friday when a friend at the yeshiva suggested we spend a day at the beach in Tel Aviv and then go to a shabbat service in the evening that was being held not in Jerusalem, not in a synagogue even, but on the promenade looking out over the sea.


We got there around 6pm, salty and slightly burnt, to find maybe 100 people sitting around in white plastic chairs, chatting and listening to Jewish-ish music performed by a keyboard player, a flautist, a drummer and a couple of singers. In front of us was the sea, the sun beginning to set on the horizon and, rather wonderfully (see below) a jet-skier riding the waves. To begin with, if I'm honest, the service wasn't really my kind of thing. (I am a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to liturgy.) But once I had climbed down from by hoity-toity high horse it was possibly one of the best shabbat evening services I have been to for a long time. We sang songs, we sang the prayers, we prayed out over the sea, the sun set (which marked the start of the shabbat) and it all felt somehow cosmic even. And then, as if the whole thing had been choreographed by Disney, at the point when we stood to welcome the shabbat as if it/she were a bride coming to her wedding (a Kabbalistic idea - the Shechinah again), the jet-skier did a superb leap over a wave that looked as if this particular bride was already on her tropical honeymoon package, which included free watersports at the resort.


Tomorrow I will go to Dahab for some scuba diving. I have found a small resort that I hope will be suitably hippy-ish and low-key. And I have borrowed a pile of low-grade books from the non-Jewish, non-Israel, non-serious part of the yeshiva library that I am hoping to plough through with a beer or two by the sea. I'll be back here briefly next weekend but really this is my farewell to the city - for now at least. I've had a great time and I've been looking through some of the pictures that give me fond memories and which I have uploaded here before. So, because I don't really have any new ones, I've posted a few of them here again.