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| The Journey Outline |
These past couple of days I took myself up north and did a bit of a trek. The main, I guess, catalyst for the trip was the line in Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen Song: “Do something every day that scares you”.
I don’t have a camping phobia per se. I’m just crap at it.
So I caught me a bus up to Tzfat, holy city which I would have loved to stay in and absorbed all its mystical energies, but I had walking to do. I headed down the hill out of the city to a place called Ein Chovesh which was the start of my trail.
By this stage the sun was well over head and its heat was unrelenting, but I pressed on until I came across a domed hut coated in moss overlooking the valley I planned to toddle through. A perfect place to cook myself a hearty lunch; vegetable curry with rice. This meal made no dent whatsoever in the 20kg I had packed in my backpack.
Oh the backpack, how I learned to hate it, forever imprinted in my shoulders.
I continued down in through Nachal Amud (Amud River), a once gushing stream, now a rocky unsteady path. I had to scale boulders, and descending down hills covered with pebbles, there were cliff ledges and thorned bushes which loved to get under my skin.
I’ll admit I slipped and fell many times. Birds definitely blushed when they heard the profanities which rolled of my tongue each time I scrapped my knees, knocked my shins, or stubbed my toes.
The first night I found an abandoned overgrown clay oven, which looked like a great place to rest my travel-weary limbs and get shelter from the elements. Little did I think that other things also sought shelter from the elements. I spent half the night checking that the scorpions in the cracks next to my head weren’t advancing and that the mice weren’t digging too much at the mud which held the bricks over my head.
After dark I decided to light myself a small fire in my grotto, a feeble attempt at warding away the wasps nesting on some wild flowers sprouting through the cracks. I ended up smoking myself out of the hut. I at my dinner in the dark outside.
When I came back in I buried the dwindling fire under dirt I scooped up from the ground. The smell of burning garbage and faeces explained that it wasn’t just any old dirt. The dense smoke was replaced by an insufferable stench. My dinner was soiled.
I went to sleep after a cup of overly sugared tea at the responsible hour of 8pm only to be woken up by the sound of squeaking mice and hay being chewed. Wild horses had come to feed outside and then on top my already unstable shelter.
Although I was in my bed for 12 hours, I probably only got about 3 hours sleep.
The next day couldn’t have come faster. I only wish the end of my water didn’t come so quickly.
I managed to get to the motorway with half a litre left, the sun was already starting to bash my head in.
I checked the map (surprised I know how to read one?) and headed the 3km with my 20kg to the nearest gas station. Filled up, recovered, and walked the 3km back to start my day’s trek. Back into the river bed I went.
I met some fellow hikers on the way who commented straight away on how large my pack was. “What!? I had to take a jacket! And my mum would have killed me if she found out I didn’t take 8 days worth of food!”
I completed the rest of the 7 kilometres signing aloud and talking to myself excessively, passing banana plantations and some nice cliffs shaped by wind erosion – so many different layers of sediment! I set up camp on a camping ground next to a goat farm in Ein Nun near a town called Migdal.
Surprisingly less to worry about when you’re sleeping under the stars. Just cats scrounging around for garbage.
From there I took a bus up to Rosh Pina where I met up with a friend and after a much needed shower we heading to the river stream near the Lebanon border where we hiked, played cards, camped and donated blood to needy mosquitoes. From there we hiked to Kiryat Shemona and bussed back to Rosh Pina where I headed off to spend Shabbat in a small town near Nazareth called Hoshe’a (Hosea) which was just lovely.
I went on this hike to iron out the kinks in my head about the purpose of it all. I needed a chance to think about what exactly I’m doing here, and why it feels more important for me to be in Israel than to be with my friends, my family, those remarkable beaches, the super funky bars in and around Oxford St, and the cafes which actually prefer you to order a specific and complicated cup of coffee where the waitresses should be walking up and down catwalks instead of crooked stairs from the kitchen to the tables. Also why I feel a responsibility to this country when so many other places around the world could use a helping hand. What is the attraction, the magnetism I feel to this people, to the soil.
I didn’t really work out all the answers, and the ones I did work out are difficult to explain. I think put plainly, I feel as Yeats did to his motherland, I just simply feel that I am of Israel.
