Hiking in the desert will do that to you.
Especially when it's 100 degrees. Good thing we went in early March, or I would have definitely melted.
This weekend, three friends and I went to Ein Gedi, the nature reserve next to the Dead Sea for two days of sunnin' and funnin'. And by that I mean hiking.
Anyways, even the ride there was exciting. We descended from Jerusalem (on top of a hill) to the lowest point on earth (the Dead Sea), which meant for half of the 1 1/2 hour ride, I was deaf, and for the other half, everything was excruciatingly loud. Darn ear pressure.
We're rolling along, and all of a sudden we roll by this toll-booth looking place, and Armin, one of the people I went with, goes, "Hey, we're in the West Bank right now."
What!?
Parents, before you die, it was a C zone area, which means it is under Israeli control, and totally safe. (If you don't believe me, which I know you don't, see the Administration section of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_bank. Resume breathing).
So now I have the street cred of having gone into the West Bank without any of the danger! Sweet!
We drove by a woman in full hijab herding a goat, a man herding a flock of camels (gaggle? herd? pride? whatever the word is for camel groups is), and Jericho. Jericho was kind of lame, just a low-lying city, but I guess I shouldn't have been expecting any tall walls, for obvious reasons.

Anyways, we get to the field school where we stayed, and it was rad. There were ibexes just cruising around, horns and all, like it was no big deal. Check in wasn't until 3, so we stashed our stuff, filled up our water bottles and headed out.
10:15 am.
Friday we hiked up Mt Yishav, a rocky, barren outcrop with a marvelous view of the Dead Sea and Wadi David.
Wadi is some bizarre word that is neither English nor Hebrew... It means canyon, but there is a different word for canyon in Hebrew, and the Hebrew signs all had that word (don't ask me what it is, like I remember). And unless I'm mistaken, 'wadi' doesn't mean anything in English, so...
Yeah. Made up words. Great.
Anyways, we hike-hike-hiked to the top of Mt Yishav, scrambling up the mountain side, sliding on the loose rocks, and sweating like woah. It was hot.
At one point, we reached a place where there was a really rad echo. Doing the only logical thing on a mountain of loose rocks, we all stand close together and shout, "1, 2, 3, SHALOM!"
Really sweet echo, and also really sweet lack of fatal rock slide.
We finally get to the top and it is. So. Hot. We take some victory pictures on top, and stop to drink in the view, and some water.

To the one side, we can see the wadi we're headed to later, another side, the Dead Sea, and the other side, the desert plateau which we are now on.

The plateau is completely deserted except for a bright green truck in the distance. No idea how it got up there, as the trails we used were hardly fit for mountain goats, let alone a truck.
We climb back down and head into the wadi, and lose the trail, as we had been threatening to do all day. We know the falls we're headed to are further up, so we just hike in the dry riverbed, figuring we'll find it eventually, or turn back and find the trail again.
We go on like this for a while, when we see a man running towards us and shouting in Hebrew. No one has any idea what he's saying, so we stutter out in Hebrew that we don't speak Hebrew, does he speak English?
And of course he does.
And of course he's a park ranger, and of course we're in a closed part of the reserve, and of course the park is closing.
Did I mention the ranger is heavily armed? Oh, Israel...
He walks us back to the trail and part of the way out, and was asking about our day. We told him we climbed Mt Yishav, and he goes, "Oh, I know. We watched you on our telescope."
Of course.
It turns out that the desert plateau we reached was about a 4-hour walk from Hebron, a controversial town in the West Bank. Apparently sometimes Hamas likes to send people up there to do things. Drug and arms smuggling from Jordan across the Dead Sea mostly.
We got lucky today, no militants. Huh.
He leaves us at these crystal-clear pools that are allegedly okay to drink out of, and I tried a handful just to try, and it was delicious and cold. I'm still skeptical of filling an entire bottle of the stuff, but it's nice to say I tried it.

We hike down some more into the wadi (Wadi David), and finally reach some of the most amazing and surprising falls. Surprising because we spent the rest of the day in a DESERT.

We leave the main falls because there were loads of tourists who had taken the canyon walk in, and we found another, smaller one further down, thankfully took off our shoes, and jumped in.

We splashed around, floated, reveled in the not-hotness-and-suniness of it all, swam up the waterfall and got pounded in the face with water. A ranger came and told us it was time to go (recurring theme of the trip), so we reluctantly put our shoes back on (sorry, feet), and walked back to the field school.
4:15 pm. Long day, right
I was asleep by 8:30. And woke up at 6:45 to do it all over again.
Sorry, body.
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