Tourism Archives - Page 95 of 97

Favorite Water Hike: Nahal Yehudiyeh

One of my favorite hikes in Israel is along the Nahal Yehudiyeh in the Golan Heights. You have to swim, and in non-summer months the water is a bit chilly. But it’s an exciting hike in many ways.

Arutz-7 has a story which includes the details you need to know before you go. One sample:

Hiking the upper section of Nahal Yehudia is considered to be appropriate for good hikers who can swim, as there are a couple of places where you have to climb down the rock face with the help of handholds or a ladder into a deep pool that you have to swim across. Note that you must start out on the well-marked trail by noon.
The hike starts above the wadi on the red trail, walking through a deserted Syrian village of basalt field stones built on the remains of an earlier Jewish town from the Roman-Byzantine period.
Remains of a wall have led archaeologists to suggest that Yehudia is Soganey, one of the three fortresses (the other two are Gamla and Sele’ukya) in the Golan built by Josephus at the time of the Roman Revolt.

I don’t know how easy it is to find any more, but a great resource for adventures like these is the book by Joel Roskin, Waterwalks in Israel (Jerusalem Post, 1996).

Nahal Yehudiyeh waterfall

UPDATE: The author of the article, Shmuel Browns, has commented below. Take a look at his website for a more comprehensive article and photos.

Tagged Galilee, Tourism

The Petra of Saudi Arabia

Madain Saleh is a beautiful Nabatean site that few know about because of restrictions from the Saudi Arabian government. The AP has a good article about it, and you can see some beautiful photos at Nabatea.net.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Much of the world knows Petra, the ancient ruin in modern-day Jordan that is celebrated in poetry as “the rose-red city, ‘half as old as time,'” and which provided the climactic backdrop for “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
But far fewer know Madain Saleh, a similarly spectacular treasure built by the same civilization, the Nabateans.
That’s because it’s in Saudi Arabia, where conservatives are deeply hostile to pagan, Jewish and Christian sites that predate the founding of Islam in the 7th century.
But now, in a quiet but notable change of course, the kingdom has opened up an archaeology boom by allowing Saudi and foreign archaeologists to explore cities and trade routes long lost in the desert.
The sensitivities run deep. Archaeologists are cautioned not to talk about pre-Islamic finds outside scholarly literature. Few ancient treasures are on display, and no Christian or Jewish relics. A 4th or 5th century church in eastern Saudi Arabia has been fenced off ever since its accidental discovery 20 years ago and its exact whereabouts kept secret.
In the eyes of conservatives, the land where Islam was founded and the Prophet Muhammad was born must remain purely Muslim. Saudi Arabia bans public displays of crosses and churches, and whenever non-Islamic artifacts are excavated, the news must be kept low-key lest hard-liners destroy the finds.

The rest of the article is here.

HT: Agade via Joe Lauer

Tagged Tourism

Jerusalem Insider’s Guide

I’ve recently learned about a new website devoted solely to the city of Jerusalem. If you are planning a trip to the city, this site has a number of pages that may help you to get the most of your time. For instance:

Best Jerusalem Old City sites – this “top 10” list has 12 recommendations and I would basically agree with the selections. The hours and prices are helpful as well, as long as they remain up to date.

Some extra links reflect the extra time spent developing the website, such as the tips about appropriate attire for Hezekiah’s Tunnel and information about the Jerusalem mp3 tour.

The Museum Guide gives eight recommendations, including full pages about three of them. The Israel Museum page gives a good summary of the major highlights, though it will be worth mentioning here that the Archaeology Wing is closed until 2010 (Middle East Time).

I’m not sure how many times I’ve had to explain how to get from Ben Gurion airport to Jerusalem, but this page gives all the details you need to know except the price for a shared taxi (about $11 or NIS equivalent).

There are some points I would disagree with – such as women in pants being required to wear skirts at the Western Wall prayer area (I’ve never seen that) – but overall the advice seems sensible and accurate.

Some sections are still under development, such as “Where to Eat,” but overall visitors will find much to help them plan their trip in the city.

Tagged Jerusalem, Tourism

“Bible Valley” Park

Yediot Ahronot has an article which was summarized in the Caspari Center Media Review about a subject that I have not read about elsewhere. Nor have I heard of a “Judaean valley,” but from the context I believe this refers to what geographers sometimes call the “Chalk Moat” on the eastern side of the Shephelah, near biblical Adullam.

In an article entitled "Bible Now," Eldar Beck looked at the background to the opening of a new "Bible valley" in the Judaean valley. The person responsible for the idea, Amos Rolnick, grew up on a Shomer HaTza’ir kibbutz which cancelled its Purim festivities due to Stalin’s death…. Rolnick, a kibbutznik who broke away to become a ‘capitalist,’ understood that Israel possessed the greatest financial potential in the world: lovers of the Bible. ‘I understood the power of the Bible in the world,’ he acknowledges. This understanding led him to conceive one of the most daring of tourist ventures now being planned in Israel: the creation of a ‘Bible valley’ park – a reconstruction of the biblical experience in a journey for Jewish history buffs, to be spread out over 100 dunams [25 acres] of land located in one of the central foci of the biblical story, in the Addulam strip in the Judaean valley, south of Jerusalem, not far from Beit Shemesh. ‘The Bible valley’ is defined as an interfaith project – Jewish and Christian – so that it will be possible to use it to link the hundreds of millions of those who also believe in the New Testament to the Land. It will be comprised of features devoted to the different biblical periods: it will contain a ‘Forest of legends,’ a ‘Forest of the land of milk and honey,’ a ‘Forest of the prophets,’ a ‘Forest of kings,’ and, of course, a ‘Forest of the Song of Songs.’ Via various technologies, visitors will be able to pass from our own time to the days of the Bible and to experience the course of history and faith … The heart of the park is intended to be the ‘Bible house,’ which will serve as permanent accommodation for the children’s paintings … as well as help in raising the funds for the next monumental project: ‘The people of the world write the Bible,’ in which framework the books of the Bible will be written by hand by people across the world, in their native language. The intention, explains Rolnick, is to get to at least 100 books, in 100 languages." The first books have already been written – in Taiwanese, Tamil, Finnish, Mandarin, Bengali – and are currently on exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem…. The project, supported by various individuals including academics and literary figures, is due to be built within the next five years, the Bible house being first on the list.

More information about the project is given in the article.

Tagged New Exhibits, Shephelah, Tourism

Jerusalem 17th Top City for Tourists

From Arutz-7:

An annual poll by the Travel and Leisure Magazine has named Jerusalem its 17th top city for tourists throughout the world – ahead of Los Angeles, Paris, and more. In its 14th annual survey of the best cities around the world to visit, the magazine ranked Jerusalem number 17, ahead of London and most American cities. In the United States, only New York and San Francisco place ahead of Judaism’s holiest city…. In first place on the list was the relatively unfamiliar city of Udaipur, India. This year’s survey marked the first time that results were included from readers in South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Australia and New Zealand, Turkey and Mexico. Behind Udaipur on the list are Capetown, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Chiang Mai (Thailand), Florence (Italy), Luang Prabang (Laos), New York, Rome and San Francisco.

The complete list is posted at travelandleisure.com.

Tagged Jerusalem, Tourism

Pompeii’s Dead

A new book on Pompeii by classics scholar Mary Beard of Cambridge University is considered in a travel article in the Globe and Mail. Beard believes that most of those who died were either slaves or those who intentionally chose to take their chances.

Beard argues that Pompeii’s population was smaller than previously thought, about 12,000, and that most escaped the volcanic eruption, taking the bulk of their possessions with them.
That would explain why relatively few corpses (1,100) and household effects were later found. Some citizens and slaves – half the population were slaves, many of them Jews brought from Israel after the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD – must have been stranded or chosen to stay. There were, after all, remains of 21 fresh bread loaves found in Pompeii’s ovens, when excavations began in the mid-18th century.
Beard’s book is too new to have changed the way local tour guides and historians treat the Pompeii saga, but for anyone contemplating a visit to one of the world’s greatest archeological sites, it’s a useful read.

The article continues with a look at the nearby ruins of Herculaneum and the modern city of Naples.

It ends with advice that I wish someone had given me: do not even think about driving a car in Naples.

Mount Vesuvius from the south

HT: Explorator

Tagged Italy, Tourism