My 36 hours as a Bedouin. (This is really long. At least there are pics. Feel free to skip it if it doesn’t interest you).
The Bedouins are a nomadic, Arabic tribe that wandered Saudi Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula before settling in Negev region of Israel, where they practice Islam. We stayed for two nights in a Bedouin “inspired” camp owned by a Jewish family. The lifestyle is tents and blanket covered stools and couches that are, at most, 12 inches of the ground. You may be wondering why we stayed there. I was wondering the same thing when we checked in.
We do highly customized itineraries when we travel. We only see what we want to see and see it on our own lazy schedule. I book everything. I get a global plan for covering a country and then start booking day-by-day from beginning to end. Sometimes there are glitches, like trying to find a place near Masada on the first night of Passover. As a Protestant, this problem was not on my radar. All the Dead Sea resorts were totally booked when I was making our reservations 6 weeks in advance.
Masada is a mountain-top fortress that was the site where a group of Jewish rebels held off Roman soldiers for a year in 73 BC, until the Romans build a ramp to the top. Rather that allowing themselves to be captured, the Jewish rebels all killed themselves (well, all except for one guy who became a historian for the Roman empire). It was the only thing DH really wanted to see besides Tel Aviv, so I had to make it work.
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In theory, the Bedouin camp was good. It was 6 miles from Masada on the inland side away from the Dead Sea. It had camel rides which are a big thing for me. It would be an interesting experience, sort of like nomadic Disneyland. It would be ok to sleep in a room that is a cross between a cabin and a tent. I was expecting the camp to have about 20 rooms accommodating 80 people. In actuality, the camp was huge and accommodated 3,000 people for corporate retreats, or about 1,000 when it is filled with families. I can’t believe that many people come to a place in the middle of nowhere. That is N-O-W-H-E-R-E as in the middle of the barren Judean dessert. If the car did not have an internet connection and WAZE, we would have never found it.
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The little brown stripe center left is the camp and the bump center right is Masada. The Dead Sea is in the background.
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You have seen deer crossing signs. On the way to the camp, we passed signs that said Watch for Camels Near the Road. This is like a joke but it is not. Why do camels stand beside the road? That is the only place that weeds grow. Everything else is totally barren. The shallow ditches by the roads collect more water, so the weeds grow there and the camels eat them. There were free range camels on the hillsides, along with flocks of goats, and flocks of sheep. We passed one camel between us and the guardrail.
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Free range camels
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We discovered that the road to the camp does go to a back entrance to Masada, but if you go to that entrance you have to hike to the top of the mountain. It is not like Yosemite where you can enter at one entrance and drive through the park to the other. The drive back to the main entrance (with the cable car to the top) was an hour and a half.
When we checked in, I realized we were in trouble when the staff person showed us the shared bathrooms and showers. We are old people who go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This is not going to be fun.
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Our cabin, which slept 8, had a private porch but no real door, just a blanket over the door opening. In the cabin, sitting 12 inches off the floor is actually worse than sitting on the floor, if you have old knees. Then she showed us the dining hall for breakfast, which was too far for DH to walk as he is currently having back problems.
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The final straw was when we asked for the wifi code, only to find out they don’t have internet. I was nearly in tears. I felt like I couldn’t do that 1.5 hour drive to Masada and back multiple times. I wanted to check the Dead Sea resorts to inquire if they have any cancellations. Our phones were dead. Cell service doesn’t work there except in the car with its limited internet. I just kept muttering that I feel like Lucy Ricardo for some of the crazy things I do.
We made it work for the night. We had no choice. After we ate and DH calmed me down, we started to enjoy the quiet of the desert. In the booking process, the reservations lady had told me the camp would be full of Israeli families celebrating Passover. We were told to bring our own dinner as the camp would not have food service that night. I had imagined families of 6 or 8. Wrong. It was families of 20-40-60 and more. There were huge tents with tables in the middle with mattresses on the floor around the edge. In some cases, it was like a city block with three big tents on a square. Everyone was sitting at picnic tables, cooking or singing or laughing or reading scriptures. We really enjoyed vicariously being part of their Seder dinners. As we walked around, we tried to be unobtrusive. No one would look at us. DH who is very gregarious and normally talks to everyone, kept his mouth shut. Happily, the bed was comfortable. The temperature was good. There were man-made water features by our cabin, so all the birds hung out in our area. The camp’s peacock picked our roof to sleep on, so we felt like that was a good omen.
Isn't it funny we have a McDonalds cup?
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The good omen--the peacock who slept on our roof.
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The next day we drove to Masada. I had booked us into a tour which was coming from Jerusalem, and we were supposed to meet them at the entrance. This was a work around for another one of those glitches. All the cable car tickets were sold out 6 weeks in advance, so the only way we could get to the top without walking was to join this tour for an hour. We were going to meet up using WhatsApp. WhatsApp worked great in the car. It did not occur to us it would not work inside the park headquarters unless we signed into the park’s internet. We couldn’t find the tour and they couldn’t find us. When we finally connected, they were at the top with our cable tickets, and we were still at the bottom. At first the ticket taker at the cable car wouldn’t let us up without the ticket. DH was hugging me and trying to console me as I was blithering again about being Lucy Ricardo. The ticket taker changed his mind saying he tries to do one good thing for someone every day, and we were his good deed of the day. He let us up.
The first picture is the walking trail up. The trail is the white zig zag on the right. From the top, the walkers look like ants.
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I thought we had kept people in our tour waiting on us for a long time while we caught up with them and I felt bad. I thought we were “those people” everyone hates. At the end, I learned they only waited for us for 5 minutes and I felt better.
This is the ramp to the top that the Romans built 2,000 years ago.
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Then it was back to the camp.
The forum won't let me attach more than 12 pics so a new post for the last 4.
