The view into Eilat from Mount Shlomo
The past month has been full of dozens of blog-posts-worthy of stories, and yet here I am, my first night living in Jerusalem, just beginning to scratch the surface. What happened? Well, I was busy, to put it bluntly. For better or worse, just too busy to have time to sit down and write anything worthwhile. But I haven’t given up — in my mind, I’ve got a running list of stories and adventures that, at some point, I’ll commit to writing down. To name a few: My first Thanksgiving in Israel; an all-night desert rave; a week hiking Makhtesh Ramon; bringing a 3-week-old puppy on a bus across Israel.
But I think The Time I Watched Egyptian Soldiers Illegally Cross Israel’s Border qualifies as the most crucial story to write right now, even though it was the most recent, so here goes.
I recently spent two non-consecutive weeks hiking through some of southern Israel’s most beautiful trails with a crew of 12 students on my trip. The hikes were planned as the conclusion of the semester for my students living on kibbutz; for three weeks, they would hike different sections of Shivil Yisrael (the Israel Trail), which includes over 900 kilometers of interconnected trails spanning from the northern tip of Israel down to Eilat in the south. The first week found the group trekking from the picturesque, tiny town of Mitzpe Ramon through the gaping, 40 km Mahktesh (crator) Ramon and finishing up near the border of Jordan. My second week hiking (the group’s third and final week), we began at Timne Park and shot south for 5 days, ending up in Eilat. But not before we were nearly caught in a military conflict between Israel and Egypt. All in a day’s work.
