Haifa, Hadas and Sruli

6/11/2011 - 6/19/2011

Our penultimate stop in Israel was an idyllic ten days at Hahotrim kibbutz with the wonderful Hadas and Sruli. The kibbutz isn't really a kibbutz so much any more, at least not in the traditional sense, with most of the people there working outside the kibbutz and just pooling some money for communal resources.

Highlights:

Hozumi getting acupunctured by Hadas in an attempt to cure her cold. Apparently the needles don't hurt but the burning does.

Danny the hyper-racist Russian next-door neighbour who claimed to hate everybody equally but was clearly biased in all the ways you'd expect. We spent a couple of days sightseeing with him, learning about all the different varieties of thieves, cheats and stupid people he'd encountered in his lifetime.

The Bahá'í gardens were quite beautiful, and I like the idea of a garden to represent a religion's most holy place instead of yet another monolithic structure. Their teachings seem pretty sound too, given that it is a religion, with all the associated baggage.

The Rosh Hanikra grottoes showed the sea at its most elemental. Pounding, crashing, spraying, sluicing awesome waves that carved out some beautiful shapes in the rock. The British-built railway through the rocks used to transport military material and later to exchange captives finally got blown up by Israeli soldiers in a covert operation right under the Brits' noses to eliminate a possible invasion route by Lebanon.

Cycling with Sruli, my first experience with a suspension lockout. Far from my first with gravel burn. Good fun.

Hiking with Hadas and learning about her hitch-hiking experiences as a teen. The guy who kept a mouse in his afro and Hadas' technique for weeding out suspicious would-be lift-givers: Ask to be taken to a place that doesn't exist, which in itself was a pun for 'non-existent-place'.

The beach.

A surprise visit from Hadal and Asaf.

Visiting the parents! Sruli's mum cooked up a feast, some of the best food we had all year.

Omar and Ein Hod, the artist's village full of sculptures. Homebrew stout and ale.

Eventually we had to say goodbye, as Sruli went off to his army reserve training and we decided to make Tel Aviv our last stop in Israel before, bizarrely, flying to England. All the overland routes to Turkey were blocked to us after we got Israeli stamps in our passports. The 'peace' flotilla fracas meant that we couldn't find any ferries to Cyprus at the time and a search for flights revealed that the cheapest destinations were England and Germany, with just-next-door Turkey being twice the price. So in the end England was an easy choice, what with me not having visited for eight years and some family reunions being way overdue.