A visit to the west side of Massada

Today (21 July 2012), we decided to visit the west side of Massada, the famous and iconic fortress where the Jews held out as long as they could against the might of the Roman Empire.

In order to get there, one must first drive to Arad, and then one takes a road (a good 20 km long) whose sole purpose, it seems, is to take us to this spot.

This first picture shows the view of Massada from shortly after it first comes into view. As you can see, we are still at a higher elevation than the top of the fortress. Here, you can see all of Massada and also another mountain (to the right of it) that is about the same height. In fact, they don't look separate from this angle, but they are actually separated by a wide gap with nearly vertical walls on both sides. In the distance, of course, is the Dead Sea (the lowest point on the surface of our planet that is not under water!).

Here's a view from much closer and lower that shows only the north end of Massada.

This view is slightly to the right of the one above and is zoomed in more. This is the earthen ramp that the Romans had to build in order to assault the fortress. Imagine the effort and logistics required to move this much dirt, in the middle of a very DRY desert, with NO modern equipment, nearly 2000 years ago! If I had been one of them, I would surely have said, "Forget about it! Just let them HAVE the d*** place!"

This last picture may well be used to illustrate the definition of "serendipity" in the future! I didn't even know that this bird was there until I looked at my photos after getting home and loading them into my computer. I still don't know what kind of bird it is, but it looks magnificent!

A nice picture, and some news about new blogs

Let's start with the nice picture. On Tuesday, David and I decided to get out a bit, since I wasn't very busy, so we took a short drive up the Arava to Kibbutz Yotvata. On the way, there were a few clouds in the western sky, and, some of the time, the sun went behind them. This was too good a photo opportunity for me. Here's one of the pictures that I took:

Now for the news -- I've started 2 new blogs during this week. You may ask why I'm doing this. The reason is that I feel that this blog has become a bit unfocused, and I thought it might be interesting to have blogs focused on particular topics. In addition, I'm planning to do a LOT more writing, so this will become more important.

The first blog that I started is entitled "Arlan's Day -- and online journal". If you'd really like to follow my daily life, including a lot of trivial things, of course, this is where you'll be able to do it. I hope to post there nearly every day. Here's the link to view it.

The second blog I just started this afternoon. It's entitled "Israel and its neighbors -- a political review of the week". As you might guess from the title, I will only be writing weekly in it. My plan is to collect links to various articles during the week and then tie them together with my comments on what they contain and why I think they're worth reading. I really hope that a lot of you will read at least some of the articles, because I KNOW that you'll get a better idea of the real issues facing Israel! Here's the link to this blog.

I am NOT abandoning THIS blog, however! This is where I plan to post most of the pictures and the stories about various places I go. In other words, it will become mostly (though not TOTALLY!) a sort of travelog about our adventures here.

Videos of Nakhal Yoash

Yesterday (Shabbat, 7 July 2012) I took another early morning hike up Nakhal Yoash. This time, I took my video camera with me. Here are a couple of the videos I shot that help to give you a feel of the beautiful valley. I hope that these short movies give you a little more sense of the beauty of the place. Enjoy!