The negev desert

I'd first like to start off with correction. In a past post I discussed how a palestinian student had told me that in the west bank there was no voicemail or internet on mobile phones. After speaking with some other students, I no longer think this is the case, and have no idea why he told me that. I didn't really want to pester him about it and thought I would just let it be.

Last weekend all the instructors went out to the negev desert to offroad and camp under the desert stars with two of MEET's directors, Amir and Asaf. I'd like to thank the lovely people at Mitsubishi for their gracious donation of 3 trucks and 1 jeep for our adventure. Here we are starting off, Dan behind the wheel, Ted and Aline in the back:



Oh yea, it's on. So we drive for awhile, we take a wrong turn and we can't U-turn forever, it get's a little bit hot and barren. As Dan said repeatedly throughout our trip "Here we go!" in the voice of mario in mario kart for N64.


Hmmmm, getting to be a bit desert-like.


Unfortunately I can't think of a "Why did the camel cross the road" joke that is either sufficiently good or bad to fit my tastes.


desert-like indeed.


It's official, we're in the desert.


If an israeli tank breaks down, they just leave it there I guess. After all, who cares about the desert?????




Meet the bedouin and his camels who live, and care deeply about, the desert. They are nomadic people by nature who are resistant to living in single spot. Israel has tried to build towns for them to improve their education and health, and while some have, others are still resistant.

Once we got to off-roading (I should mention that I have never off-roaded, but am so down to do it because of how X-treme I am) the scenes really open up. I won't give a desciption.







Only the most rugged men can hike through this rough terrain. GRRRR!




All of the paths that we went alongs are maintained by a group in israel that is basically like the boy/girl scouts. While they did a very good job, we still got quite lost got to our campsite quite late. It didn't matter much thought because we already had some marinated chicken kebab and steak to cook up, as well as a lot of hummus and vegtables. After the sun set, it did turn out that the stars are quite the site because we were in a crater that blocked out outside light, and there was very little light pollution to begin with. I'd descibe further but I don't think I'd do a good job, I don't have any pictures to go with it, and I just don't think it would be entertaining.

Here's something interesting with pictures. These are pictures of nebatean fortresses and the trading paths that they made which went from the east as far as china all the way to the mediterannean. All of this was pre-roman times.





After two days in the desert, we went to the dead sea, the lowest point of land on earth. It is completely saturated with salt, and you float in it all the time. Any cuts you have on your body really hurt and you can't put your head under the water because it hurts your eyes. The water and air are so salty that many old people go here because it helps any skin problems that they might have. The first picture of Josh floating on his back and some other shots of the dead sea. Across the sea is Jordan. You'll see on the bottom picture there are dividers that separate sections of the dead sea. This has been done because the water level keeps dropping and so they have cut off the southern section and allowed it to dry while keeping the rest of the dead sea at a more acceptable level. There is a plan in place to make a pipeline from I believe the red sea to the dead sea, and since the dead sea is below sea level it would flow without power and they could actually use to to make power.





To finish, I'd like to make a few small points. First, I'd like to apologize for the lameness of this post for those who like me cracking jokes. While the desert was interesting, it wasn't didn't have as much comedy.

Also, I'd like to say how bad blogging on blogspot is. Specifically, adding pictures takes much much too long, and they only show up at the top of the page and then you have to copy and past them. Furthermore, vertical pictures that I save as a vertical picture on my computer still show up as horizontal, and I don't know what to do about this. At this point I've done more than half my posts here so I think it would be too much of a hassle to switch so I'll jus stick with it, but it sucks.