Trek of the month: Park Rabin
The road through Park Rabin
This month’s recommendation for a great hike in Israel is the lovely Park Rabin area, just outside of Beit Shemesh. The tiyul kicks off along the western segment of the famous Burma Road, the surreptitious back route to Jerusalem, built in 1948 to slip past the Jordanian blockade of Israel’s then nascent capital.
The western Burma Road is a popular biking path and there is a cycle rental place and parking lot just off Highway 38 (before the Paz gas station if you’re coming from Route 1). You can also buy a medley of potted plants and garden furniture or cool off with a gooey chocolate ice cream bar from the well-appointed snack bar. There are even a couple of showers – great after a strenuous ride, run or hike.
Since the Burma Road is, as its name implies, an actual “road,” the path is not as narrow and rocky as die-hard trekkers might prefer, but the scenery more than makes up for it. There are majestic pine trees, vineyards, agricultural fields and a host of small playgrounds with swings and slides. There’s also a pretty little picnic area mid-way through, just right for your tiyul-standard peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Every once in a while, a jeep or dune buggy may come rattling by, stirring up dirt and gravel. Surprisingly, though, most of the two-wheelers head off on another, perhaps less well marked, path (for those who are following along with their Israel Trail Map #9, you take the red trail to the green trail and back via the black trail).
The whole tiyul takes about 4 hours with breaks. It is mostly flat with a few short ups and downs; suitable for a family. It’s a loop trail, meaning you can do it with just a single car – no need to park one car at the beginning and the other at the end of the route. Also, as it’s near Beit Shemesh, you can arrive by a regular bus or shared taxi.
(You can also hike the Burma Road’s eastern route – a steep ascent with a spectacular view towards Jerusalem from the same parking lot up to Beit Meir. More on that here.)
Hit the road on Sukkot
Filed under: History and Culture, Religion, Travel
View from the top: the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway
The Jewish festival of Sukkot begins tonight and, 25 hours later, the country heads to the highways. Seemingly the entire state of Israel can be found outside, lounging at the beach, barbecuing at a national park, or hiking the Israel Trail.
The reason is called hol ha moed – the days in-between the start and end of the 8-day Sukkot holiday – where there’s no school in sight and many employers give their staff half-day holidays.
Over the past several months, I’ve written about a number of wonderful tiyulim that Israelis – and visitors to Israel – can traipse, often with the whole family. Now, as hints of cooler weather poke their cloudy heads through the perennial sunshine, I want to share one last hike for hol ha moed.
This one, which starts on the famed Burma Road, is a little bit on the tough side, so hopefully you’ll avoid some of the crowds. Nevertheless, get out early to avoid the gridlock that stops traffic cold by noon.
The Burma Road holds a critical historical role in helping besieged Jerusalem survive the Arab stranglehold on the city in the 1948 War of Independence. With the main highway to Jerusalem blocked to Jewish convoys, Israeli forces constructed a clandestine bypass route that kept the city from starving.
The route for this tiyul starts at the parking lot and picnic area near the Paz Gas station on road 38 (just off the exit from Highway 1, the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway).
The hike isn’t actually on the Burma Road itself – you turn off fairly quickly onto the Israel Trail which parallels the famous path and which is now a well-traveled Jeep trail (not so fun for walkers).
The first hour and a half of the hike is an intense climb up to the village of Beit Meir with little shade except for some rest stops with breathtaking views of the entire region, from the Mediterranean Sea to the foothills of Jerusalem.
From the summit, it’s all down hill as the path plunges into a thick forest, heading steeply into the Kessalon Ravine before bottoming out at the Bnei Brith Cave. This walk is treacherous – the route is slippery and blocked by fallen trees in several spots.
This whole section is known as the Martyrs’ Forest and is built to symbolize specific events during the Holocaust (the steep sides of the valley are supposed to recollect the ravine at Babi Yar).
Hikers have the option of continuing on the Israel Trail towards Shoeva and Kibbutz Tzova, or cutting out early at Eshtaol, ending up back on road 38 near Beit Shemesh. We opted for the latter and caught a taxi back to our car a few kilometers away.
Jacob Solomon wrote a series of articles about hikes along the Israel Trail in The Jerusalem Post back in 2005. The erstwhile hiker provides great detail, covering every twist and turn, flora and fauna, and historical sites along the way. It was his article on the Burma Trail and Martyr’s Forest that set us in the right direction. Here’s a link to a complete archive of his pieces.
Are those pickles kosher?
Filed under: A New Reality, Food, General, History and Culture, Israeliness
Chef Moshe Basson prepares a kosher delicacy in the Eucalyptus kitchen. (Photo: Marc Israel Sellem)
Not ready to live with the traditional kosher fare available, two immigrants from the US, Ari Greenspan of Efrat and Ari Zivotofsky of Beit Shemesh, have spent years studying the Biblical origins of kosher food.
Don’t forget, besides forbidding lobster stew and quiche Lorraine, there are plenty of exotic animals, fowl and birds that are considered kosher, but generally not found in your local kosher deli.
That’s why Zivotofsky and Greenspan decided to throw a lavish 18-course-meal this week featuring pheasant and guinea fowl pastry as an appetizer, water buffalo, swordfish and deer as main courses, and fried locusts for dessert.
The “mesorah dinner,” held at Eucalyptus Restaurant, across from Jerusalem’s Old City walls, was designed to pass along the “chain of tradition” of which animals, birds, fish and locusts are kosher and which are not.
Prepared by the restaurant’s chef Moshe Basson, who has made a career on perfecting the traditional ‘land of Israel’ cuisine, the meal started off with Ethiopian Injera bread and “Shiluach Haken soup.” According to a report on the meal in The Jerusalem Post, the soup commemorated the mitzva of sending away the mother bird, because it featured a fleishig egg (an egg extracted from a live chicken) inside a noodle nest in sparrow, dove and pigeon broth.
The soup was followed by quail in caramel sauce; figs stuffed with wild chicken and wild rice; duck, goose, muscovy and mullard in honey-ginger sauce; the pheasants/guinea fowl pastry, and turkey that the chef unveiled with great fanfare.
The heart of the meal featured cow udder in saffron; a combination swordfish, kingklip and blue marlin; and the shibuta, a fish from the Euphrates River that is famed for tasting like bacon. The shibuta was brought from southeastern Turkey, and the swordfish was caught by a tuna fisherman in the Mediterranean.
The next courses were sheep and goat in endives; water buffalo; and spotted deer and red deer.
Not your typical fare in any restaurant, let alone a kosher bistro in Jerusalem. According to the report, most of the participants were too full, or grossed out, to partake of the fried locust dessert. I guess they can wait and have that on Pessah.
Cacti efforts
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Israeliness, Life
My brother-in-law and I have been determined to fulfill a particular task during this year following my father’s death, and that is to plant cacti around his grave. The view from his grave — in the Beit Shemesh cemetery — is of a lush forest in the distance but it’s a pretty dry place, and not even a rosemary bush would survive there.
Michael, my brother-in-law, proposed planting cacti, and making a pilgrimage to the Regev Cactus Nursery, just outside Rehovot, a place that my nature-loving father would have adored.
With some 5,000 different types of cacti, plus a slew of other garden plants as well as a menagerie of birds, fish ponds and several zen gardens, we were just amazed by what the Regevs, residents of Moshav Beit Elazari, have accomplished on their plot of land. And my father, the romantic Zionist, would have loved the Regev’s motto, as shown in the sign outside the nursery: “If there is agriculture here, there is a homeland here.” The quote is attributed to Moshe Smilansky, a Russian immigrant to Palestine in 1891 who helped found Hadera and then settled in Rehovot, where he spent the remainder of his life as a citrus plantation owner, writer and agricultural leader, heading the Histadrut ha-Ikarim, or Farmers’ Association.
You can arrange guided tours of the Regev’s nursery, including explanations of the cacti, bonsai trees and Japanese gardens. And then you can buy cacti and succulents for your garden or balcony, and save on the ever-escalating water bill.
As for us, we’ll be planting sometime in the next week, and will let you know how that goes.
Road carnage in Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, Travel
The aftermath of Friday's Beit Shemesh crash.
All the jokes about Israelis learning how to drive from manning tanks in the army, or that Israelis drive fast because of the hectic pace of life here have worn thin over the years. The fact of it is that Israelis are horrible, reckless drivers – and I’m talking a mass generalization here of an estimated 50-70% of drivers, not a manageable sub-sector minority.
Three examples. There’s a stop sign near the bus stop on the street next to my house. While waiting for the bus, I play a game of counting how many drivers actually stop, or even pretent to take their foot off the gas. 50% stop and the other 50% slow down a bit, look around and continue right through the intersection.
Example two are Egged bus drivers. Riding a bus home two or three nights a week on five miles of downhill highway (partially through a tunnel), I’m amazed at the speeds which the drivers achieve. As far as I know the speed limit is 80 km (55 miles per hour) but, the norm for Egged’s finest is more like 110 km (80 mph). Whenever I’ve queried the drivers (when I’ve been brave enough to open my eyes), they just laugh it off and say “Don’t worry, we’re fine, I’m in perfect control. You want to get home quickly, don’t you?”
The last example is on the Jordan Valley road (Ghandi’s Road) which goes south to north from near Jericho to Beit Shean. It’s got some hairpin turns through the hilly region, and the road isn’t too great to begin with.
The two or three times a year I travel on it at night, I make sure to keep to the speed limit of 80 kmh. Every single car flashes me and passes me (some on the hairpin turns).
I may sound like a crotchety, old driver, but enough’s enough. And the trend of driving while drunk, which until a few years ago was not really a factor in Israel, is like giving terrorists extra ammunition.
As long as drivers in Israel feel invincible and behave like the road is their personal domain, then we’re taking our lives in our hands each time we turn the ignition key. And it’s not just one segment of the population, although a higher percentage of accidents involve men, young drivers, and Arab drivers. But it’s a problem that faces all of us, and it’s not going to go away until everyone takes responsibility for themselves.
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