Thankfully we were allowed to drive from En Gedi to Jerusalem through the West Bank as neither of us fancied a three-hour drive around the outside of the West Bank (WB). I was still having sinus trouble and had woken with a massive earache that got progressively worse throughout the morning and when driving up the hills into Jerusalem I was squirming from the pain and the navigating was going downhill fast. We figured the many sudden changes in altitude (we had been going up around 1500m (Golan Heights) then down to –300m (Sea of Galilee) and –400m) for days and sometimes ascending and descending many times in one day was just too much. This pain stayed with me for five days and when I met a chap who was saying he wanted to put his head under in the Dead Sea “just to see what it was like” I told him exactly what it was like!! Anyhow, there didn't seem to be a quick resolution to the pain issue so we carried on as normal as we only had a day in Jerusalem and wanted to head into the WB. After dropping the rental off (top marks to Euan for doing some pretty hairy driving and negotiating the windy desert roads with a very vocal passenger) we caught a bus to Bethlehem and even the bus trip was a bit of an eye opener. The 6km trip took an hour and all on the bus were checked at the ‘border’ and some folk were kicked off and not let through (we weren’t sure why). It costs Palestinians a lot of money to get a permit to travel outside the WB and apparently this can take weeks or even months to obtain. It makes it very difficult for folk who have to farm part of their land that is outside the wall (the wall cuts through towns, farms etc) and the permit is valid only during certain hours. Most folk we met had a view on the whole WB situation and there are plenty of people up for rigorous debate on the subject. Bethlehem was interesting but we weren’t tempted to stay despite the people being friendly and generally welcoming. The price of things such as fruit for eg were much cheaper than in Jerusalem and the place had a slightly unkempt, worn feel to it. We visited the Church of Nativity and the Milk Grotto. Won’t talk about the religious importance of these sites here but I have to say that both in real life were rather under whelming compared to the buildings and behaviour seen in some of the other religious sites. Fascinating nonetheless. Going back out of the WB was probably worse than coming in and I really felt for those that were interrogated at the ‘border’ and then not allowed back on the bus. The permits perhaps were unsatisfactory. We’ll never know.
I wrote a bit about the wall in the last Jerusalem posting but below is a picture of how it looks.
A section of the ~700km wall that divides the West Bank from Israel
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