We left our hotel in Amman at 7:00 a.m. to head to the King Hussein Bridge to cross the Jordan River into Israel. We didn’t have anything else planned the entire day – that should tell you how long we expected it to take us to cross from Jordan to Israel. We got to the border at around 8:00 and got out of our bus as our Jordanian guide helped get everything taken care of with respect to our passports and the exit from Jordan. Something got stamped, but it wasn’t my passport and we were free to head over to the Israeli checkpoint.
At the Israeli checkpoint, we didn’t have a guide. Fortunately, the entire process was fairly self-explanatory. After giving away our baggage for inspection, we worked our way over to the passport control desk. Each of us requested a Form 17 to avoid having our passports stamped by Israel. (For the uninitiated, most Arab nations will not let you enter if you have an Israel stamp in your passport. For me, it probably doesn’t matter, but just in case I decide to head over to Morocco when I’m in southern Europe, I thought I’d get the Form 17.) The process wasn’t too difficult and by 10:00 a.m., we were out of the checkpoint and in Israel.
Since we got into Israel early, the entire itinerary was destroyed. The tour company had no idea how to deal with extra time and things got switched around every which way. It was decided that the first trip from the checkpoint should be Masada.
If you don’t know the story of Masada, don’t look for it here. I’m not an ancient scholar and from what I understand, the story is fairly disputed. According to Josephus, though, at the top of Masada, almost a thousand Zealots chose to commit suicide than surrender to the Romans. The site itself is fairly impressive, and what we were shown follows the traditional story, so who am I to judge – though as you’ll find in the upcoming posts, I’ve grown accustomed to places in Israel being “traditional” as opposed to “actual” and, well, any story dating back 2,000 years has to be taken with a grain of salt. But I digress.
After Masada, we went back to the Dead Sea, basically to appease one person in the group. Since we had all gone to the Dead Sea the day before in Jordan, most of us didn’t have much interest in seeing it again the very next day. The spot where we stopped was pretty dingy compared to the spot we visited on the Jordan side, but it’s probably not fair to compare things to Jordan, which was great from start to finish.
After the Dead Sea, we went to the West Bank to visit Jericho. (We went back and forth between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank fairly often during the trip. I’ll attempt to abstain from participating in a political discussion within these pages, but I found that seeing areas that up to now I had only heard about to be very educational.) I’m not sure exactly why we went to Jericho. There was a tree there. Again, I’m not a biblical or ancient history scholar and the significance of the tree never was really explained.
After the tree, we went to an area to view Temptation Mountain, not to be confused with Temptation Island, which would have been a little more interesting. According to tradition (I’m really fighting myself here not to use the word “legend”), this is the mountain in which the Devil tempted Jesus. Again, this is a “traditional” site with a monastery half-way up. Like the majority of biblical sites we visited, it was decided that this was the site in which the events of the Bible took place and celebrated as such. (For the sake of simplicity, when I talk about Israel and I say that an event took place, let’s just assume it actually took place. This is a travel blog, not a theological or historical blog.) We didn’t actually go to the mountain, we just looked at it from afar. I’m still not sure why we had to go to Jericho to do that.
That was pretty much it for the first day. After Jericho, we went to our hotel, which is an old French pilgrim’s hotel and appears to still be run by the Catholic Church. (There were photos of a visit by the current Pope in the lobby of the hotel.) It was comfortable. There was no television, but unlike the most of the hotels in Egypt, there was beer. There may be more on that topic later.
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