To the Northern Coast

Tuesday January 28th - Outside of Nazareth

Yesterday I was given the choice of staying in the north as per my itinerary, or traveling back to Tel Aviv, which was about 2 hours drive from where we finished the day at the sea of Galilee.  I asked the guide if it mattered, he said no.  I asked if it changed the amount of time for me in the car, he said, yes.  So I said, I would rather stay in the north, hoping to get to sleep in a bit more and not have to spend so long in the mini van.  The effect was not as much as I had hoped, my pick up time was still 7:45 and I still had almost an hour in a minivan on my way to first stop Caesarea.  The difference was, I was the only passenger in my minivan and the driver didn't speak English.  I guess, even though hours in the car were less for me, total car hours on the road was more.  Oh well.

The back of the theater with a random collection of statues.

 My group was already at the entrance to Caesarea when I got there, but the guide said they had only been there a few minutes.  I was joining a group that already had 6 members who had driven up from Tel Aviv, a mother/son combo from Brazil but living in Israel, a father/daughter combo from China, a law student from Brazil who studied in London and a retired woman from England who is visiting her ex-mother in law outside of Tel Aviv.  Caesarea was an important town from Harod's time until about the 4th century.  Harod had his palace there and it was the commercial center for the Roman empire in the region.  It was the most important port of the time and had ~20,000 inhabitants around 0AD.  It had an impressive theater, palace and hippodrome so that the Roman's could be entertained even during the winter when the port wasn't really accessible due to weather.  The theater is still used today as a venue for concerts and performances.

The theater, still in pretty good shape, and still used as a concert venue.

This is the reconstruction of where the palace used to be.  The columns were looted, I mean recycled, for other purposes, and the private part of the palace is now underwater as the sea level has risen ~2m in the last 2000 years.

This is 20% of the original pier (the rest having sunk into the sea).  Oddly enough, this much is preserved because the Crusaders in the 12th century restored it in order to use it as a pier.  It is weird to me to think of one ancient people restoring another ancient people's work.  It is a modern bias of mine that thinks only modern people can preserve/restore the past.

This block says that Pontius Pilot was governor  her at the time of Emperor Tiberius in the 1st century AD.

This is the seating at the end of the hippodrome, where the expensive seats were.  As the horses turned the sharp corner you were more likely to see collisions, wipe outs and blood. Which goes so show that nothing has changed - now people go to see car races instead of horse races, but they still watch for the crashes.  

The expensive seats were also very handy to the toilets, which our guide was demonstrating.

The aquaduct (but I dont remember which period it was from) that brought water from the outlying hills into the city. 

This is just a small part of Mt. Carmel (of Isaiah/burnt offering fame).  It is the longest, flattest mountain I have ever seen.

This is the view of Haifa from the top of the Bahai gardens, which we were not allowed to go into.

Haifa is the third largest city in Israel and it is full of industry.  Our guide said people go to Jerusalem to pray, to Tel Aviv to dance and to Haifa to work.  We could see oil refineries, grain silos, a huge port and other industry in town.  Of course it is hard to get the sense of a city from a seat in a tour bus, but it seemed like a good city to me.  The main drag was once a German colony which was bought from the Germans after WWII but still makes for a quaint down town area.  The gardens can be seen from much of town and they lend it a beauty and calmness that other cities don't have.  I am going to have to take a serious look at American cities when I get home, but I cant think of such high density housing in a city of this size, less than 300,000.  Maybe this is the effect of Istanbul, but 300,000 doesn't seem big anymore.

A better view of the gardens, or at least the top half of the gardens.

This is the view from the bottom looking up.

The Bahai faith was an attempt to unify the three monotheistic religions under a banner of peace.  wikipedia Sounds good to me, but I guess they haven't gotten too far.  

We drove up the coast from Haifa to Acre or Akko.  Akko was an ancient city, but small when the Crusaders showed up in the 11th century.  They thought it was the Biblical city Acre (but they were probably wrong) so they set up camp there and built it into a much bigger city with huge halls and courtyards.

These are the walls at Acre/Akko.  I don't know why the picture is vertically stretched.

The halls of the Knights (Templar or Hospitilier) are very well preserved  because the Mamlukes, who defeated and repelled the Crusaders filled the whole place in with sand before building on top.  

More toilets.  The Crusaders built them, learning from the Muslims who had retained the technology even while the rest of Europe had 'forgotten' what the Ancient Romans knew about indoor plumbing.  They took the idea with them back to Europe and improved the lives of everyone.

They believe that this was the dining room since it has the fanciest pillars.  You can rent out this hall for a party or a wedding.  

This was the secret passage way below the dining hall.  The last of the Crusaders probably escaped this way, taking all of their gold when the city fell to the Mamlukes.

Lunch: falafel, pita, pickled vegetables (the red thing is a mini eggplant pickled in beet juice) tasty hummus and more mint lemonade.  

 After lunch we went to the other side of town where the 'Templar's Tunnel' was.  Our guide says this is really misnamed since they now believe that it was built by one of the groups of Italians who lived in the city perhaps the Pisan's or the Genoese at about the same time.  The groups of Italians were competing with each other as merchants and getting thing from your warehouse to the port was a dangerous prospect.  These were not really secret tunnels as private roads.  They were rediscovered only ~10 years ago when someone had trouble with their plumbing and the plumber found a chamber under the house that lead to the tunnel.  Unfortunately, when the archaeologists were excavating they opened a spring and now the tunnel is constantly flooded and the water has to be pumped out.

Lighting and boardwak was added later. 

I will miss fruit/juicing stands when I return to California

Maybe it has to do with the three languages thing on every sign, but this is the first country I have visited where the internationally accepted red octagon doesn't say stop in one language or another.  

More aqueduct.  I thought this shot was cool with the city behind it.  If only the clouds had cooperated a little better.  

 We drove north from Akko along the coast to the very northern part of Israel at the Lebanese border to a place called Rosh Hanikra to visit the limestone grottos created by the waves pounding on the rock.  

 We took a cable car down the hill to sea level.  On the way we could see the buoys that demarcate the border between Israel and Lebanon.  This prompted a debate about how this word is pronounced.  Our Israeli guide said 'booey' but was corrected by an English woman who said it should be 'boy' just the same as girl and boy.  I thought he was right, but rather than contradicting her directly, I said that in American English it would be 'booey'.  She thought that was ridiculous and proceeded to say that she was clearly right because the language was English and she was from England and therefore she has last word on all things English.  Wikipedia does say that we are both right in our respective countries, but since the word comes from the French and the American pronunciation is closer to that, I will claim ultimate victory!

At the bottom of the cliff we walked through a limestone (studded with flint) tunnel which had been created by the waves, but enlarged for tourists.  The waves were pounding into the rock and up through the grottoes.  The sound inside the tunnels was loud and crashing.  The power evidenced was amazing.   

In case the video doesn't work, you can imagine from this picture.

I hope this video link works, even though it doesn't do the sensation justice, it is a taste of what it was like.  

I was surprised to see flint in limestone.  I thought that limestone was sedimentary (which it is) but that flint was volcanic in origin (which it isn't).  I asked the guide if he knew about the geology and he did.  I was really impressed with him, he gave the whole tour in English and Portuguese  dealt with a somewhat irritating English woman and could answer my geology questions!  He said that under certain conditions, flint pockets can form in the middle of lime stone.  The lime stone is from calcium carbonate, but where there is silica as well, and the pressure is high enough you can get layers of flint.  Kim bilir?  

We drove back south on the east side of Mt. Carmel to avoid Haifa traffic, but we still did catch a lot of slow going.  It took about two hours to get to Tel Aviv, where I switched buses and headed to Jerusalem.

Two notes that are neither here nor there:

1) Blogger has added a spell check.  This is a major up grade and I am grateful.  (You probably are too if you have been reading this blog for long.) But the spell check still needs some improvement.  You have to get very, very close to the word you want for it to recognize it.  Often it will give just one suggestion which isn't what I was looking for.  I wish I had kept notes on this as some of the suggestions were funny if frustrating.

2) A gripe about my tour company.  Other than the transfers between cities and airports, I could probably have arranged this all myself.  Of course I didn't know that when I made the reservations, but I am realizing that the tour company I have booked with is not actually taking me on any tours, they are booking tours through other companies, so I am paying twice.  I can accept this as a convenience charge and insurance against things going wrong, but what is frustrating to me is that I only get my relevant details piecemeal and at the last minute.  Perhaps this is an opportunity to practice patience and let go of my need to be in control of the situation, but somebody needs to be in control.  Did I tell the story about the driver at the airport?