Dead Sea Adventure continued...

Salaam Aleikum,
...As soon as the camels saw me they sprinted in the other direction.
So much for my dreams of catching one and riding victoriously to the
Dead Sea. I started walking again and saw something else rustling in
the bushes. Two young camel shepherds came running out, gave me a
quizzical look, and then started running after the camels. After they
rounded up the camels, I walked over to the older one and started
chatting. After saying hello and apologizing for scaring the camels,
I asked him how to get to the Dead Sea. He pointed southeast, the
direction I was headed before coming across the camels, and said
something I didn't understand. Ma Baaref (I don't understand) I kept
telling him. Very frustrated, he finally started yelling and pointing
"la, hadak khatar, khatar, khatar." "No, that is danger, danger,
danger." I later found out that the direction I was walking is
heavily mined, full of mountains exponentially bigger than the sand
hills I had been climbing, and full of gun toting settlers who would
not take kindly to my presence. I asked him where the nearest road
was, and he pointed east. I started off again in the direction he
pointed. About an hour later, I found the road that I had been
walking on before I made the desert detour. When I arrived back to
the road the Dead Sea was not far. I continued walking towards the
Dead Sea on the road, thinking I would be on the beach within the
hour. When I arrived at the northern tip of the sea, I discovered
that the entire area was a closed military zone. Wonderful. I had
been walking for 6 hours, it was getting dark, and an end to the trek
was nowhere in sight. I started walking down the road, holding my
thumb out. People kept passing by, looking at me, and pointing their
thumbs down. This kinda pissed me off…if you don't want to pick me
up, fine, but don't boo me as you drive by. After another 45 minutes
of walking, a guy stopped and picked me up. He was a nice Israeli guy
on his way to a big party in the Negev desert. Eventually I asked
him, "what's with people giving me the thumbs down as they speed by?"
He said that they were indicating that they weren't going where I was
going. Huh. This might be understandable, but there's only one road
that goes along the dead sea, so "going a different way" was
impossible. Anyways, I asked the guy to drop me off at the nearest
abandoned beach that wasn't a military zone. He said that going to
just any beach probably wasn't a good idea because there are huge
"salt holes" in the ground covered by a thin layer of sand. He told
me that many people fall into these holes and are swallowed by sand.
A few minutes later we came up to a military checkpoint, and he told
me that the beach below it was probably free of sandy death holes.
Wonderful, anything else I should know about? Do the soldiers shoot
tear gas at campers who sleep in? I thanked the guy who picked me up,
got out of the car, and walked by soldiers down to the beach. At the
bottom of the steep hill leading to sea was a guy trying to get his
new Audi A8 unstuck. It was hard to feel bad for this guy. He drove
a car that isn't suited for a dirt road down a long steep sand dune.
When I got closer, he started talking to me in Hebrew and was
motioning for me to come help him. Normally I would have been happy
to help, but there was no way the two of us were going to get his car
out of the massive hole he'd dug with his tires, let alone up the sand
dune. I tried explaining my thoughts about the situation. Buddy,
you're going to need a helicopter to get that thing out of here. He
was not convinced. He started to get in his car and signaled me to
get behind and push. I shook my head, waved goodbye, and continued
walking towards the Dead Sea.
There was a little light left so I set my stuff down, put my swimming
suit on, and jumped into the Dead Sea. Don't ever jump into the Dead
Sea. It felt like someone poured napalm into my eyes and nose. I
tried to open my eyes and navigate back to shore but the pain was
veritably blinding. I stood there for about 5 minutes until my eyes
recovered enough to open. When I recovered my sight, I went back onto
the shore and sat for a while. Normally I'll have a temporary lapse
in judgment followed by long periods of rational behavior. That day I
experienced total system failure. Eventually I got back into the
water and enjoyed a nice float. People say that the Dead Sea is like
the ocean except the high concentrations of salt make you more
buoyant. I would hardly call what's in the Dead Sea water. When you
go in feet down, you float with much of your chest out of the water.
That evening I laid in the water and watched the Jordanian hills
change colors as the sun set. Right above where I was camped was a
place called Qumran, the area where 2 shepherds accidentally
discovered the Dead Sea scrolls.
It got chilly when the sun dipped below the horizon, so I got out and
sat on the beach for a bit. I was exhausted from all the walking that
day, so I laid out my blankets and tried to go to sleep. I had not
anticipated ravenous mosquitoes. I covered my entire body with
clothes and tried a number of things to keep them from biting my face.
After three hours of slapping myself in the face, I'd had enough. I
ripped a branch off a tree, stuck it in the ground, and draped my
blanket over it to make a sort of head tent. This manky contraption
actually worked really well. I slept soundly till the next morning.
If there was any doubt that the other campers were Israelis, the
swimming suits, or lack thereof, made their nationalities abundantly
clear. Right after I woke up, a couple naked guys walked through my
campsite. Good morning gentlemen. A girl wearing a g-string went
down to the beach with her dad. I've become accustomed to living a
city where most girls don't even show their hair, so this was a bit
shocking.
I ate breakfast and swam for a few hours. There were some pretty big
waves, and it was fun to just lay down in the water and ride the waves
effortlessly. I packed up my stuff and started walking to the bus
stop. On there way I saw a few signs I hadn't noticed on the way
down. "Warning, Do not stay on the beach after nightfall, risk of
west Nile virus." "This beach is Administered by the Judea and
Samaria Council." The Judea and Samaria council is made of people who
think that all the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea
belongs to Israel. Unfortunately, a lot of the Israeli settlers have
very extreme interpretations of their religion. They believe that
Judea and Samaria, the name of the West Bank in ancient times, was
promised to them by God. The religious extremists in Israeli society
see God as a real estate agent, and specifically, they think
territorial references that God made 2000 years ago have some sort of
modern legal standing. I wonder how the sub-prime mortgage crisis
has affected God? God must have lost billions, there are probably for
sale signs all over heaven. People have probably gone down to
purgatory to cut back on their expenses until the biblical economy
picks up. If I were God, I'd bring peace to the Middle East to
restore confidence in Roman Empire real estate markets. So let me get
this straight, this land is holy, so you need to confiscate it at
gunpoint? Oh, and don't mind the locals, they'd be happy to move
their 500 year old communities to accommodate your extremist religious
beliefs.
I walked to the bus stop at the top of the hill. The Audi still
hadn't moved. I discovered that because of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish
holiday, buses weren't running. Here we go again. I started hitch
hiking. I waited for half an hour and no one came so I started
walking again. Shortly after I started walking, some people picked me
up. They were two Israelis, one from Tel Aviv, and one from
Jerusalem. We had a very pleasant conversation for the first 5
minutes. Things went south after the girl who was driving asked where
I was going. I told them that I was going to Jericho and living in
Nablus. "Are you a Palestinian sympathizer," the girl shouted at me.
The kids I teach live in refugee camps that are 60 years old, they've
been left destitute by the entire world. They have no identity.
Surely, you have sympathy for them? She stopped the car and told me
to get out. I got out, grabbed my stuff, and she sped off. I kept my
thumb out, but no one else picked me up. Five hours of walking later,
I was on the outskirts of Jericho.
I walked up to the Israeli checkpoint, showed them my passport, and
was waved through. Two hundred yards up the road is a Palestinian
checkpoint. They stopped me and we shot the breeze for a while. I
was exhausted and sweating profusely by this point. The Palestinian
police stopped the next bus that came by and asked the driver to give
me a ride the rest of the way into town. The driver agreed and gave
me a ride to the city center. I met my buddy Hasan for dinner, and we
went to some of the ruins around Jericho. Hasan took me to the
mini-bus center, and I caught a ride to Ramallah, where I could catch
another mini-bus to Huwarra checkpoint outside Nablus. The mini-bus
had to stop at three checkpoints where the Israeli army checked all of
our ID's. When we arrived in Ramallah, me and a kid I had been
talking to, Rajul, got off and started walking to the next bus
station. A block later, I checked my pockets to make sure I had
everything. Fuck, where's my passport? I looked everywhere. It was
on my lap in the mini-bus, and it must have fallen on the floor when I
stood up to leave the mini-bus. I explained the situation to Rajul
and he responded, "moshkeela kabir," big problem. We turned around
but the bus had already left. He started leading me around town to
possible stations where the bus might be. We ran around for 45
minutes, Rajul always asking people at the lots if they knew anything
about this bus. Eventually we were directed down an alley where a
bunch of taxi and mini-bus drivers were hanging out. He explained the
situation to one of them, and they started furiously calling people,
asking Rajul for descriptions of the guy. More than 15 of them were
yelling at each other and chain smoking, but I wasn't sure if they
were getting anywhere. Sometimes the only words I understood were
ajnabi (foreigner) and passporta. Eventually, one of them told the
others to shut up and looked at me "Michael John Coogan?" Yeah,
that's me. Yeah, Mahmoud has your passport, but he's halfway back to
Jericho. In any other country, this wouldn't be such a serious
problem, but I need my passport to go anywhere here. It's impossible
to travel in the West Bank without it, and going to the embassy in Tel
Aviv without a passport would be virtually impossible . One of the
taxi drivers grabbed the other guy's phone, and told the bus driver
to stop and leave the passport at the nearest store. He then offered
to take me to go get it, asking only that I pay for gas to get there
and back. Of course. I thanked Rajul with every Arabic expression I
could think of…without his generosity, persistence, and patience, I
have no idea what I would have done. We hopped in Ayman's 20 year old
stretch Mercedes. Ten minutes outside of Ramallah there was a bad
traffic jam around the Qualandiya checkpoint. Ayman started cursing
and I asked what was wrong. He explained that it was 8:15 and if he
didn't get me back to Ramallah by 9, I would miss the last bus to
Nablus. All of a sudden he veered off the road and started driving on
the shoulder, two tires on the pavement and the other two big rocky
ruts. We nearly took out the mirrors of passing cars. He was
romping his livelihood to get me back to Ramallah in time to catch my
bus. When the shoulder ended he cut across two lanes of bumper to
bumper traffic and started driving in the oncoming lane. He'd swerve
off the road every time we were about to have a head on collision. We
finally arrived at some store in the middle of nowhere where the other
driver had left my passport. Ayman ran back with my passport and
Robinson Crusoe, which I'd also left on the bus. He sped back to
Ramallah, and dropped me at the bus station just in time to catch the
last mini-bus. Again, I used every expression I knew to thank him,
and tried to offer him more than just gas money but he refused.
A few minutes into the next mini-bus ride, I started talking to the
guy next to me. He lives in Askar refugee camp, one of the camps
where I teach. The conversation with him is another story. The girls
in the back of the mini-bus interrupted our conversation and asked me
to open the window. It was freezing out, but I must have smelled
terrible. Dead Sea sulfur, two days of walking through heat, it must
have been bad. They clearly preferred shivering to sitting in a warm
stinky bus. I got back to Nablus safely, no thanks to my own judgment
or presence of mind. Aside from the many questionable decisions, I
had a great time and met lots of wild characters. I don't plan on
going back to the Dead Sea anytime soon.

Masaa el Khair,
Mike