Travels in the Holy Lands

I had been thinking of a Holy Lands trip for some time. A friend thought I was looking for God & everyone else just said, please be careful. It’s certainly the first time I’ve used a Lonely Planet guidebook with a section on how to survive a missile attack. Israel will never be entirely safe because of what it is & who its neighbours are. However, there had been a sustained period of relative calm, so I seized the moment.

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem

I was awake early on my first morning in Jerusalem; before the heat, ahead of the crowds. I circled the Dome of the Rock & photographed the concentric turquoise rings of the Dome of the Chain. Below me, the Jews lamented the loss of the temple at the Wailing Wall.

The city was waking up as I followed the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem is the only place in the world where you have to dodge both soldiers shouldering rifles & pilgrims carrying crosses. I bore no cross but was cornered at every station by the brash tourism of the bazaar. Everyone was my friend & I was, very welcome, sir. Except for one man.

“Where you from?” asked a craggy old shopkeeper as I picked out some tat.
“London.”
“BRITISH ARE POISON.”
At first I thought he said “British are Boyzone” & I was going to point out that actually they were Irish. Weirdly, despite his growing anger, we were in the middle of a transaction.
“Twenty Shekels, please. THE BRITISH ARE POISON!”
I gave him Fifty.
“I HATE ALL BRITISH & AMERICANS!! Oh, have you got anything smaller?”
“No.”
“I’ll just get some change from the back.”
“OK.”
From the back: “ONE DAY THE BRITISH & AMERICANS WILL BE DEFEATED!!”
He reappeared…“There you go, thirty Shekels.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks. THE BRITISH ARE POISON!”

The Via Dolorosa is a trying walk, even now.

From the site of the crucifixion, I travelled by bus from Jerusalem to the West Bank (“Bethlehem please!”), out of Israel & into the Palestinian Territories, paging back through the Gospels to the site of the Nativity. The iconography of the Nativity is stamped on Bethlehem. Star Street led down to Manger Square & Shepherds Street ran away to the countryside. I stayed among ancient walls in a traditional pilgrim hostel full of interlocking courtyards & sun terraces. Medieval arches dissolved into stonework & my room was four centuries old.

Global Corporate franchise

In Star Bucks, a bespoke local coffee house with a familiar look, I met Seif, who worked for the new Bethlehem Banksy Hotel. Over Nescafe served in a plastic beaker we agreed a fee & he drove me around town on a graffiti tour. Banksy has stencilled his imprint across the Territories, turning the awful grey wall dividing Israel & the West Bank into a concrete canvas. In turns inspiring some fine original & much copycat artwork. I showed Seif several London Banksys among my phone photos & he asked me, if perhaps, maybe, I was Banksy himself.

I said, “Do you really think Banksy would go on an incognito tour of his own artwork purely to check the guides are on-message?”

Seif laughed, nervously.

Dividing wall

In the evening, I drank Palestinian beer at a bar in Manger Square as the call to prayer swept over the city. I'd seen the beautiful Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the gorgeous city of Bethlehem & the awful wall that divides the territories. I added today into the top 20 days of my life.

Back in Jerusalem, in the room where historians have concluded the Last Supper took place; a spontaneous chorus of hallelujah broke out. Impromptu singing was a recurring & highly pleasant feature of Jerusalem but religious intensity was often quite rudely quelled by both guards & priests as it created bottlenecks among the tourist flow.

I walked amid afternoon heat up the Mount of Olives. I could smell the olive trees & sneakily picked petals from the Garden of Gethsemane. The slopes of the valley were covered by graves. Come the day of judgement, this is the front of the queue.

Dead Sea mud

In the evening, the unrelenting sun & wilting street food combined in a pincer movement to attack my constitution. I rose on the third day teeth chattering in 30 degree heat but having no space in my itinerary for sickness, I pushed on, forcing myself out to see the Dead Sea Scrolls & biblical archaeology at the Israel Museum. In the afternoon I joined an organised tour & rode through the barren hills of Judea, passing the Inn of the Good Samaritan & down, down to the Dead Sea. Coated in thick mineral-rich mud, I lay in the sun until it dried, then floated on the filmy surface of the sea, drifting towards Jordan as the mud peeled away. I felt alive again.

I left Jerusalem & took the bus to Tel Aviv. My neighbour was in the military & slung his rifle on his lap, barrel pointing at my thigh. It’s amazing how quickly things like this become the norm. As he slept, I nudged it away.

Bauhaus architecture, Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a coastal town; all gargantuan high-rise & beach promenades. However, step back a block & it changes for the better. Jewish students at the Bauhaus in Dessau saw the writing on the wall in the 1930s & fled Nazism in search of a new life amid the sand dunes of the Palestine seaboard. This area grew into Tel Aviv & the city revels in its Bauhaus legacy. Curved balconies wrap around apartment blocks, glass bricks create lightwells & the wrinkled brows of blistered paint expose the true age of the buildings. The relentless hammering sun wasn’t a lesson taught back in East Germany. On the whole, this isn’t museum showcase architecture; people live here, d-locking bikes in the lightwells & hanging washing across balconies.

The modernity of Tel Aviv has a counterpart in Jaffa, its southern neighbour. Jaffa is both the port city of Jonah, swallowed by a whale & the Greek myth city of Andromeda, chained to a rock. Its well-scrubbed honey coloured stones set among steep hills felt ancient & warm. In a port-side café, I drank freshly squeezed orange juice & looked back up the beach to the glass towers & Germanic order of the new city.




Jonah & the Whale

On my final morning, I headed to the sea, crashing around in the waves of the Mediterranean; refreshing myself ahead of endless airport security & a five hour flight home. Israel was a different travel experience; the summer heat was relentless, it was expensive, and everywhere stood groups of teenage recruits brandishing weaponry. Clearly, the centre-point for three major religions is always going to be a tense place, although the only altercation I had was with a craggy shopkeeper & even that was closer to comedy then acrimony.

I’d seen the very spot where Jesus was born & the rock upon which he died, but best of all was the Dead Sea; unique, surreal & a great way to revitalise. It’s always great to return home after a solo trip away, but it’s even more rewarding to come home when the guidebook has a missile attack section & I didn’t need to use it.