Israel, part 3: Acco

The day after visiting Ir David I came down with a flu, and had to miss the trip to Herodium and most of Haifa. Our next trip was to Acco (photos 119 - 129).

The Old Town is designed, understandably, as a maze. There are signs helpfully pointing you to various landmarks; if you follow them, you invariably end up in the bazaar. I am sure this is done on purpose. We finally succeded in finding the old Turkish Bath, now converted into the Municipal Museum (where they make you listen to one of the stupidest shows I've ever heard - and I've heard a few - otherwise they won't let you in), and then the Underground Crusaders' Fortress, which was our main goal. Honestly, if you want to see a Crusaders' fortress, go to Belvoir. The one in Acco is bigger but nowhere as beautiful. You walk through a series of bare underground rooms, and in each one the audio guide tells you the same thing: "This magnificent ... (fill in the blank: hall, refectory, entrance way, etc.)... was used by Crusaders. Then it was completely filled with earth, by such-and-such Sultan in preparation for such-and-such war, and later uncovered by the archaeologists."

According to Frommer, one of the knights' halls contains a patch of plaster in the ceiling, where fifty-something Irgun fighters escaped from the British prison-fortress directly overhead. The audio guide apparently didn't find this information sufficiently important to mention, and I didn't succeed in locating the patch on my own. Disappointed, I was ready to declare the tour a total waste of time, when suddenly we arrived at the next stop... a magnificent latrine!

Impressive, isn't it? Armed with this new insight into the day-to-day lives of Crusaders, we headed back to the ramparts for lunch. On the way, we passed through a Crusaders' tunnel (which was probably also filled with earth at some point, and not completely dug out, because in certain parts even Temma and I had to duck, not to mention Alex and David).

Finally, this is my favorite part of the trip to Acco - lunch with a view.

Israel, part 2: Jerusalem, City of David

I was going to post from Israel, but the vacation proved too hectic... The post about Zippori ended up the only one I managed to write there. When I returned, I was going to continue describing our vacation, in chronological order: Belvoir, Gamla, Tel Aviv - Yafo, then Jerusalem, and so on. Now I know, this is not going to happen either. So look at the photos.

They, at least, are in chronological order, so far:
- Zippori: 1 - 25
- Belvoir: 26 - 32
- Gamla: 37 - 53
- Neve Tzedek: 54 - 63
- Old Yafo: 64 - 74

And finally, photos 76 - 100: our tour of Ir David, the City of David, just to the south of the Old City of Jerusalem. We went there early in the morning: you walk along the Old City walls, just past the entrance towards the Western Wall, turn right - and go down, maybe a 100 yards. It is on a little hill by itself, but lower than the Temple Mount. This is supposedly one of the reasons this city survived unmolested in the ancient times: it was in a valley surrounded by higher hills - so enemies couldn't see it from far away - however, once they descended into the valley and saw the city, they had to get up on the hill from there, to conquer it. And the city had good defenses, very good: strong walls and such. The city belonged to the Jebusites, and that was precisely the reason King David decided to make it his capital: he wanted a city that was situated between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but did not belong to either tribe... politics, you know... So he gathered his army and approached the city walls, from below. And from the top of the walls, the Jebusites kept laughing and yelling: "David, you are not going to come here! The lame and the blind will stop you..." - and so on. And, just as it is described in 2 Samuel 5:8, King David told his troops: "Go and find the tzinnor, get through it to the city, and hit the Jebusites where it hurts, whether lame or blind or whatever" - because I guess he didn't like it when somebody laughed down at him, any more than any other king. So, what is the tzinnor?

It was a popular setup, at the time, to have a city up on a hill, and the water source - a spring - down below, outside the city walls. However, the city population had to have access to the water source in case of siege, so various ingenious systems were developed to protect the spring, cover it from the outside, and then dig a tunnel through the mountain to get to the water from inside the city. A good example of this can be seen in Megiddo, which we visited in 2007.

Jebusites supposedly has a similar system, with tzinnor being the tunnel, and David's plan of attack was - instead of storming the walls - to find the spring, climb up the tunnel, and get to the Jebusites through their soft underbelly, so to speak. Jebusites did not expect that: maybe they thought their spring was well hidden or well protected, or maybe they didn't realize that the narrow shaft, used for dropping down a bucket tied to a rope and pulling it back up, can also be used for climbing up by agile warriors, led by a man thinking "outside the box": the very same man who earlier thought of using a slingshot in a nontraditional way, also with great success...

This is an appealing story, and one that makes sense. What's more, I was shown the tzinnor (called Warren's Shaft, because it was discovered by a British officer, Charles Warren) when we went to Ir David in 2007. I took a photo of it then...

... just as I did now (photo 79).

Except now, according to out guide Arie, they do not think this is the tzinnor. New discoveries, shown in my photos 80 and 81, suggest that the Jebusites did not have to fill up their buckets by dropping them through a shaft, because they had built an elaborate walkable tunnel leading all the way to the spring. The spring itself was protected by a strong tower, with walls up to 4 meters thick and at least 8 meters tall.

Archeologists date the tower and the original tunnel at 1800 BCE, and say that only much later, about 800 BCE, the tunnel was made deeper for some reason, and Warren's Shaft (which appears to be a natural carst formation, not man-made) thus became connected to the water supply system. Case closed.

I have to confess: I was very disappointed. Here I had photos of the tzinnor, and it turned out not to be the tzinnor. What's more, where IS the tzinnor? Where had David's men climbed, on their way to defeat the enemy and claim the new capital for their genius king? When I asked Arie, he said something along the lines: "We don't know exactly what the word 'tzinnor' meant in Biblical times, it might have meant the whole water supply system. All we know is that these very stones date back 3800 years, they could have seen Abraham, they could have seen David." Now, I don't know about you, but I personally wasn't satisfied. And right then and there, I decided to continue believing that David's men climbed up Warren's Shaft - until such time when the archeologists give me a viable alternative. At that moment, my decision was based on pure stubbornness, with maybe a little gut feeling thrown in. But rereading the whole story now, I want to make a case: the fact that the water supply contained a pool, elaborate tunnel, and tower 3800 years ago would have been relevant if it was Abraham trying to storm the city. David was actually doing this 800 years later, that is, 3000 years ago. And we know that 2800 years ago the tunnel was made deeper "for some reason." So I can suggest a very good reason for making a tunnel deeper: maybe the water left? Maybe the spring shifted, and they had to dig deeper to get to the water? And maybe it started happening earlier, so by the time David was about to storm the city, the old water supply system was no longer used, and Jebusites actually DID get their water by dropping the buckets down a vertical shaft? For lack of a better theory, I am going to stick to that one for now.

The tzinnor (or the non-tzinnor) and the rest of the tunnels that might have witnessed David storming the city are now dry, because the waters from the Gihon spring were diverted into a newer and bigger tunnel built by King Hezekiah some 300 years later. The Assyrians were coming, and he had to secure the water supply. To save time, they were working from both ends towards each other, cutting through stone and obviously receiving directions to turn a bit to the left or to the right at several points, and somehow met in the middle. Modern scientists still haven't figured out how they managed that. When I first heard about this, I said irreverently that they were probably singing really loud, but after going through the tunnel and seeing for myself I was really impressed. Photo 87 shows where the two groups met - there is maybe 80 cm vertical difference in the ceiling (the floor, of course, had to be made level), and there were several abrupt turns in the tunnel both before and after the meeting place. The captions really tell it all, start at photo 82 and click forward, and you'll get a virtual tour.

Later photos show recent discoveries - portions of a huge staircase leading to the Temple Mount. Again, the captions have a lot of information, so I am not going to repeat it. Another large chunk of the excavations was supposed to be opened to the public on Yom HaAtzmaut (soon after our departure), so if you visit Ir David now you'll be able to see even more.

In Israel

Our vacation started so intensely that I haven't had time to post. We managed to pack a few weeks' worth of activity in the first two days, and continued at a decent pace for the rest of the week. Now in Haifa with a flu (yep, it's a bummer!) I finally have a chance to sort through the several hundred photos taken so far, and post a few impressions... while the rest of my family is out exploring...

Ok, so here goes... The whole concept of time in Israel deserves a separate essay, at least. Time here takes on so many additional dimensions and qualities: length, speed, density... Sometimes it flies, sometimes it stands still. Sometimes it stretches: we flew in on Friday, and by Sunday afternoon it felt like that was a few weeks ago, and even the morning of that same Sunday felt like distant past... And everything is either 2000 years old, or 5000 years old, or somewhere in between - when you place your palm or brush your fingertips over the stones that have seen people and events too mindboggling to contemplate, it seems that time thickens to a consistency where you can almost touch it.

First stop, Zippori. I've never seen so many different kinds of mozaics all in one place: Roman, Hellenistic, Jewish... Below is the most famous one, often referred to as "the Mona Lisa of the Galilee" (although in reality she is probably Aphrodite, based on the fact that she is beautiful and has a little boy with a bow and arrow in the background).

And finally, the floor of a synagogue, 5th century AD, with mosaics including, among others, a Zodiak design, as well as the binding of Isaac, and inscriptions in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

I cannot possibly post all the images here, you'll have to wait until they are in my Picasa album. Just one more: we are walking down a Roman street. Talking about time... see the ruts from the ancient wheels?

They were then, and we are now, and this was here...

To be continued...

The Importance of Time

Time is fascinating. It flows like a river, and you can never enter the same river twice... You might want to relive your favorite moments, but you can't—the best you can do is try to preserve them in amber, capture the feelings, the impressions...

This is what this blog will be about. I might try to revisit some of the memories, and then hopefully provide more timely updates as new adventures come along.

New Mexico Vacation

Our New Mexico vacation in April 2008 was anything but relaxing. The area is so rich with natural wonders, historic landmarks, and beautiful art and architecture that it is extremely hard to limit the scope of what you are going to see. Therefore, during our first trip to New Mexico we covered a lot of ground, 1500 miles in 8 days, to be exact -- and hence another title for this trip report:

Around the WorldNew Mexico in Eighty Days

Generally speaking, we started in the middle (in Albuquerque) and made a lopsided figure-eight from there: first up and to the left to nearby Colorado, then back to the middle to Santa Fe, then a bigger loop down and to the right, briefly touching Texas and even Mexico, and finally back to Albuquerque. With the exception of the two last nights in Albuquerque, we stayed in each hotel for just one night. I never got to unpack properly...

So anyway, here is the trip report, day by day.

Day 1

After umpteen hours of flight, two breakfasts (they insisted on feeding us breakfast at the Chicago airport, claiming it was only 8 am, while for us it definitely felt more like lunchtime, 6 hours after our first breakfast that day), and finally a proper lunch in Albuquerque, we headed northwest in our beautiful rented SUV. We didn't take a picture of the SUV right away, and since we immediately did some off-road driving we couldn't take a picture that would do it justice until we washed it a few days later, but I am placing it here a bit out of sequence. Here it is:

Our off-road driving that first day brought us to the Chaco Culture historical site. These are 1000-year-old ruins (give or take a few years) of Anasazi Chacoan villages, situated in a canyon in the middle of nowhere, with the only access along 20-something miles of an unpaved road. The road is very dusty, but enlivened by grazing livestock (as in, cows). Once you get there, the canyon is quite beautiful, and the ruins make you think something along the lines of: "Well, if they could build that 1000 years ago!.."

That day we drove (that is, Alex drove) about 300 miles on top of the plane ride, and by about 10 pm, local time, we arrived in Cortez, CO, where we spent the first night. Cortez goes to bed early and nothing was open at 10 pm, so that's where we finally ate our sandwiches, packed just in case (for example, if our first flight got delayed and we didn't have time to eat in Chicago). I knew they would come in handy! After that, we were too exhausted to do much of anything but sleep.

Day 2

Second day started with Mesa Verde.

Talk about amazing! We didn't get to go to the Balcony House, where you climb a series of tall ladders along the cliff, because it hasn't yet reopened after the winter. End of April in the Colorado mountains is still early spring: though the temperatures were in the 60s, we saw quite a bit of snow by the roadside. That was a bit disappointing. But we did go to the Cliff Palace -- here it is, carved out of the mountainside 800 years ago!..

...and the Spruce Tree House, which was reconstructed to a greater degree. So it is less authentic, but you get to do some fun interactive stuff. Here I am going into and sitting in a kiva, and Temma is grinding corn, in a time-honored tradition... She didn't get to throw it at anybody to complete the experience...

We got done with Mesa Verde around 3 pm (could have easily spent another couple of days there!) and continued our travel eastward. Stopped for lunch in Durango -- which looked like a nice little town with historic and cultural background, and might have been fun to explore, have we had more time -- and then drove on to Pagosa Springs. The springs (as in, hot springs) are right in the river, and the Springs resort, where we stayed, has 11 picturesque pools of different shapes and with varying water temperature, like this...

The pools are open quite late, probably until 11 pm, so we ended the day with a magical hot soak under the stars... pure bliss! Sorry, no photo... 

Day 3

After the final morning dip in the hot springs, we headed south, towards Santa Fe. We planned to stop in Taos along the way, but that road was closed. We went to Los Alamos instead and saw the museum detailing the Manhattan project. Very educational.

Santa Fe is an undisputed fine arts capital of the Southwest and beyond. It is chock full of art galleries and small jewelry stores, with all kinds of art spilling out onto the streets. I was fascinated by the street sculpture. Not only are they colorful, but look at the details!

Fine food, as usual, follows fine art. A very nice French restaurant is located in the Burro alley (which is decorated with burro images, like this)...

...and next door to our hotel was Cafe Le Zodiak. Now that's what I call hot chocolate!

Also a block from our hotel was the famous Loretto chapel, with a "miracle" staircase. It makes a 360 degrees turn without any visible means of support.

Day 4

The next day started with the hot chocolate, shown above, and some more store browsing. We got some very nice turquoise jewelry for the females in the family and, after lunch, started on the next big loop of our journey. We had to travel another 300 mi down southeast and arrive to Carlsbad by nightfall, to report to Carlsbad Caves bright and early the following morning. So most of the day was spent driving very fast along an (almost) empty divided highway through an (almost) empty desert-like landscape.

Along the way, we passed Roswell, home of the International UFO museum and the site of countless UFO encounters... We didn't see any UFOs, with the possible exception of a white car that overtook us on the empty highway. Alex was going a conservative 90 (out of respect to the local police possibly having figured out places to hide in the surrounding flat emptiness). Having gotten such a leader, he of course upped it up a bit and tried to follow, but gave up when he was going 110 and the white car was still receding ahead. So the white car left unidentified, and it was certainly flying towards Roswell... By the time we reached Roswell, the UFO museum was closed, but I wanted to drive through the town to get the feel of the place. What can I say? If I was an alien and had to stick to small nondescript towns in the area, I would rather go to Durango...

We arrived in Carlsbad earlier than we expected and made our first mistake. One of the attractions of the caves is the flight of bats. At dusk, thousands of bats fly out of the cave and you can watch them do it. But the bats are seasonal, and not supposed to arrive until later in the year. We knew that and didn't bother to check. Turns out, some of them -- just a few hundred -- arrived early, and if we only drove another 20 miles to the caves that evening, we could have seen them fly. But we didn't...

Day 5

The Carlsbad Caves are unbelievable! We did only one guided tour (the Left-Hand Tunnel tour with lanterns) because on most guided tours they do not allow children under 12. This is a clear example of age discrimination, which my spunky 10-year-old proved by doing more than 5 hours of running, walking, climbing, and exploration inside these caves without a peep. We did the two self-guided tours: first you enter through the mouth of the cave (the natural entrance) and go down, down, down... along a spiral path that leads you to the Big Room, about 17 stories deep (to relieve the suspense, let me mention right now that there is an elevator, which takes you up after you are done). The second self-guided tour is going around the Big Room, which is really big. There are walkways and lights strategically placed around the Big Room, but not in the Left-Hand Tunnel, where you need a guide and lanterns (and a prior reservation, as they only take 15 people). At one point, the guide made us blow out the lanterns (after having checked first that her lighter works), and let me tell you, it is really dark there. As in, you can't see anything. Very uncomfortable...

So here we are, starting the descent...

... here are some wonders we've seen along the way...

... and this is the lantern tour...

We were done in the caves by around 4 pm, had an unmemorable lunch at the diner nearby, and made our second mistake by failing to fill up the tank. Gas stations in this part of the world are few and far between, so this mistake might have turned out to be very costly... We were traveling pretty much on fumes when we finally came to a station, and it was fortunately open.

We spent the night in El Paso, in a very nice Holiday Inn Express, and had dinner in a very pleasant Italian restaurant nearby, recommended by the clerk at the reception desk. Unfortunately, these two places, the hotel and the restaurant, are pretty much the highlights of El Paso... In the evening we went for a stroll around the downtown area and it was very disappointing. Some remnants of former glory maybe, but nothing to do or look at now...

Day 6

Since we were in El Paso anyway, we decided to walk across the border to Mexico and have lunch there. If you've spent a significant part of your life in the Soviet Russia, you get a kick out of just walking across a border on a whim. Like other people climb mountains: "Because it was there!.." So there was this border with Mexico, and here I am standing on it.

See the smile? -- that's on the way there... I would say, this pretty much turned out to be our third mistake. This part of Mexico struck me as dirty and unpleasant, with people alternately begging for money or trying to sell you some worthless junk in a very insistent way. I didn't dare feeding my family there, but I had to use a bathroom at one point, and the sooner this experience is forgotten the better... The price, by the way, is exactly the same as for crossing the border, 35 cents -- being able to actually wait until on our side of the border would have been priceless... The only pleasant impression of visiting this part of Mexico was left by a mango cut up like a pine cone, shown below.

Having returned to our car, we ate a quick lunch along the way and headed to the aircraft museum, our main purpose in visiting El Paso in the first place (that, and the fact that we had to get back somehow from Carlsbad to Albuquerque). The museum has some interesting exhibits, including the MIG-15 and P-40 Warhawk (with teeth)...

This is still Day 6 -- next stop, White Sands. This turned out to be much more fun than I expected. The weather was just perfect for it -- I am told that in the summer the sand gets unbearably hot, but here it was nice and cool, very fine, mostly hard-packed so you can walk on it, and the dunes soft enough to let the rest of my family jump, roll, and play leapfrog. And the view -- magnificent!..

It was very hard to convince the kids to leave, but I had a goal: to pass the lava beds before nightfall (we also had a more remote goal, to arrive in Albuquerque at a more-or-less reasonable hour, because we were staying in a small motel owned by a retired couple, and didn't want to have them wait up for us). So here are the lava beds:

Day 7

As I said, we were staying in a small motel, which I found in the AAA guide and it seemed too good to be true. It was situated on the famous Route 66, a few minutes' walk, literally, from the historic town center and all the little museums, shops and cafes, and very reasonably priced. It also turned out to be extremely clean and well-maintained, with very nice and friendly owners, and here we spent our last two nights. (I suppose I could have finally unpacked, but there didn't seem to be any sense in doing so at this point.)

Old town in Albuquerque is in some ways similar to Santa Fe -- the same adobe-style architecture, abundance of little shops and cafes and of local artists selling their crafts (including turquoise jewelry...) -- but it is more compact and, I would say, more relaxed. You can walk around the whole place in 15-20 minutes. You can also spend hours exploring the little museums (such as the Turquoise museum, or the Rattlesnake museum), browsing the artists' market, eating, and picture-taking.

We spent the whole morning in the old town...

...then went to the Zoo...

...and finished the day by riding the longest gondola route (either in America or in the world, I don't remember) to the top of Sandia peak. It was rather chilly there, even snow on the ground in a few places. We saw an eagle quite nearby, except it didn't wait to pose for the picture...

We ended our vacation that evening with a dinner in a really nice restaurant in the old town (compensation for all our inadequate meals along the way), spent the last night in our motel, and the next morning flew back to Boston. If I had to do it again -- and I sure hope I will someday! -- I would probably break it into two separate vacations: one including Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Mesa Verde, and Pagosa Springs, the other with the caves and the white sands. But this one, even with all the driving around, was wonderful anyway!