Mon 25 December 2006   (ChristMas day)

I woke up early on ChristMas day, after 5 o’clock, as the minarets of mosques began to summon people for morning prayer. I assumed that this invitation was not meant for Christians, so I turned in my bed and continued sleeping for another two hours.

After eating breakfast at Jaffa Gate (ice cream and some cookies), I went to Mount Zion to check if my car was still on the parking lot. To my delight the vehicle was unstolen and unburnt in its proper place, so I started driving towards Jericho. (It happened on one of these mornings that another car near mine had a smashed window and some property stolen.)

Jericho is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, so I had to pass a military checkpoint just outside Jericho. The Israeli soldiers stopped my car and greeted me in Hebrew, to which I replied in Hebrew fluent enough to save me from further inquisition. I arrived at the site of ancient Jericho at 8 o’clock, but the place was not open yet, neither was the cable car running to Mount Quruntul. The souvenir shop was open though, so I went there to do some shopping.

I intended to buy a few post cards or perhaps a poster, but after being attacked by the ever so enthusiastic Arab salesmen, I soon found myself at the cashier’s desk with a large Jerusalem poster, a pot of date honey, an ice cream, and a flag of Palestine in my hands. They also became convinced that I need a personal tourist guide, and some minutes later there was a short middle-aged Palestinian gentleman sitting in my car, ready to show me all the wonders of Jericho. He agreed in my presence (or did I actually agree with him?) that we would go to see the refugee camps, then the Winter Palace of Herod, and the tour would end on top of Mount Quruntul. The price would be “whatever I want to pay him after the tour is over”.

The refugee “camp” was actually an urban suburb with unpaved roads and slightly below average standard of living (according to Arab standards of the region). The place looked so ordinary that I forgot to take any photos there, as we encountered nothing that would have caught my special attention.

Our next destination was the Winter Palace of Herod, which was not in a very impressive condition either: the buildings had certainly been magnificent once, but only the foundations were remaining now. A renovated replica of the ancient palace might be very interesting, but destroyed palaces only make me wonder why they are not renovated.

The pace of this sightseeing tour was slower than I would have preferred, and I feared that if I spend too much time with this professional but slowly walking tourist guide, I might not have enough time today to visit also Qumran, Herodion, and a dozen places in Jerusalem. I agreed with the guide that we would watch Mount Quruntul only from afar, without ascending on the top, and I would pay him 100 shekels (equal to 24 US dollars) for his services.

“Only 100 shekels? Not any more than that?”, the tourist guide complained, as I paid him for the one-hour tour. He stepped out of my car, and kept murmuring: “Whatever you want to pay me, I always let the customer decide...”

It took twenty minutes to drive from Jericho to Qumran. I paid the entrance fee, climbed on the roof of the reception kiosk, and took a panoramic photo set of the area. Then I went back to my car and drove away, only ten minutes after having entered the site. (I missed the caves, but my plan for this journey was to see little of everything, instead of seeing everything of little.)

Leaving Qumran at 10:30, I drove northwest towards Jerusalem, and picked a young hitch-hiker who was travelling to a small Jewish settlement on the West Bank, not far from Ma’aleh Adummim. The guard at the gate of the settlement regarded me as a security risk, however, and refused to let me drive in, despite my hitch-hiker’s attempts to persuade the guard. The boy had to walk the final kilometer or two to his home, while I turned back towards Jerusalem.

The weather was favourable for panoramic photography (though more clouds would have been welcome on the sky, to make the background perfect). I spent two hours and a half taking panoramic photos of Jerusalem, from several nice locations around the Old City. These photos are available on a separate page, with a map indicating where each photo was taken.

At 14:15 I visited the HolyLand hotel in southern Jerusalem, hoping to see the model of ancient Jerusalem. I was told that the model has been relocated at Israel Museum, so I left the hotel and continued southeast towards Herodion (which is 12 kilometers south of Jerusalem).

The driving instructions that I had found on the Internet recommended driving first to Ramat Rachel and then towards Tekoa. I could not find any road signs to Tekoa or Herodion in Ramat Rachel, so I stopped at a construction site to ask for help. (New houses seem to be rising here like mushrooms on rainy weather.) The builders told me that the road to Herodion is no longer in use, because the path of the security wall cuts the road, and Herodion is on the other side of the wall.

I heard that there would have been a hiking route to Herodion, but I did not have time for hiking. Instead I went hunting for the model of Jerusalem, which was supposed to be at Israel Museum near the Knesset. But when I arrived at Israel Museum, I only found a construction site proclaiming that the model of ancient Jerusalem was being relocated to this site. The work was not ready yet, and the place was not open for public.

It was 15:30 o’clock already, the sun was slowly beginning to set, and all major tourist attractions would soon close their doors. I finished the more or less scheduled part of the day by taking a photo of the Cross Monastery next to Israel Museum. Then I finished this ChristMas day by driving 130 km north to Nazareth, via highway 6 near the coast of Mediterranean Sea.

I arrived at the shopping mall of Nazareth Illit at 18:30, and ate an unceremonial ChristMas dinner in a fast food restaurant. (Nazareth Illit is the modern Jewish city, a few kilometers east of the older city called Nazareth, which is inhabited mainly by Muslims and Christians.) After the discounted ChristMas meal I drove to Nazareth and started looking for Fawzi Azar Inn, where I had booked a room for the night.

I parked my car somewhere on the narrow alleys of Nazareth (which are not really wide enough for car traffic, but used for that purpose anyway). I tried to memorize the name of the street, which was a number code only (as were all the small streets in this area). Then I started walking towards the assumed location of the hostel, using a map that was not quite detailed enough to be more helpful than annoying. I found the hostel anyway, and then we returned with the manager of the hostel to search for my car, which I had left somewhere on a street named with a number code or something...

When we found the car, the manager of the hostel directed me to a better and safer parking lot — which turned out to be the most annoying parking lot that I have ever seen. The entrance was narrower than my car, and I had to drive with one tyre on the stairway and the other tyre on the so-called street, to get through the ramp that lead to the parking lot.

After clearing this obstacle without ruining the car, there were yet more challenges ahead: the lots for cars where in pairs of two, surrounded by large beton vases on both sides. These beton vases were less tall than the front and rear part of cars, so it was impossible to see them from behind the steering wheel. The vases were simply waiting there like mines to be hit by a careless driver (and probably also by many quite careful drivers). With the help of the hostel manager I cleared also these obstacles, but I was not very enthusiastic about the thought of returning here early next morning to pass all these obstacles and the far too narrow entrance ramp, alone.

The trip meter of the car showed 2525 km (of which 305 km had been driven today), as I left the car on the parking lot and hoped that no one would steal it or destroy it during the night. (An hour earlier I had seen police officers inspecting smashed car windows on the parking lot of Nazareth Illit shopping mall, while I visited the mall to eat my ChristMas dinner.)

We walked back to Fawzi Azar Inn with the hostel manager, and I received a room for four people, for the price of a dorm bed. (This was not high tourist season for Nazareth, while in many other cities in the Middle East ChristMas is a high season with inflated prices and large crowds of tourists.) I left the lights on in my room, and went to the lobby to surf on the Internet for a while.

When I returned to my room, I could easily see into the room from the outside (now that the lights were left on in the room). The large windows of the room had thin red curtains, which gave the impression of blocking light while I was inside the room, but actually did not do so when seen from outside, while the lights were turned on in the room.

One of my favourite hobbies is spotting idiotic blunders made by architects and interior designers, and imagining a law that would send an architect back to school for a year if his design contains major blunders. It is not uncommon to see shower facilities where the showers and their users are visible into the public area outside, when someone else opens the door to enter the place or exit from there. My first hostel on this journey, the Sky Hostel in Tel Aviv, had toilets and shower facilities meant for both genders, with some kind of doors but no locks of any kind.

I turned the lights off in my room, wished myself merry ChristMas, and went to sleep.