Strange things happen

Jerusalem, 7:45 AM

Sometimes the luck in finding a ride leads to unexpected consequences. I'll meet my host after 6 PM. Mmh, that means ten hours roaming in Jerusalem. OK, let's find a place to drop the backpack and then a nice place to have breakfast!

But this is Israel: you cannot drop your luggage anywhere. I mean it. The police will come and blow your backpack just before you realise that it is raining underwear. Your underwear!

After one hour or so, I recognise a desperate glance coming from under a huge backpack: another CouchSurfer is facing the no-drop feature of this place! We decide to have a breakfast in the old city while looking for a solution.

Walking the Holy City. The holiest place on Earth — at least for a handful of different religions.

We feel the holiness raising as we approach the old city, in terms of amount of religious symbols on sale: here you can buy any kind of sacred item, ranging from Coptic Orthodox necklaces to FC Barcelona t-shirts! (I am pretty sure that there were also gondola-lamps somewhere, but to actually find it would be too depressing!)

Climbing the Via Dolorosa carrying a heavy burden makes you think all sort of strange things …

But eventually we sit on a nice café and with great relief for my soul, the morning starts looking kind of familiar :-)

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Photos of Jerusalem here.

Hitch hiking in the desert

My two days in Tel Aviv are fast and intense. After the first night clubbing I found myself crashed in somebody else's couch with my original host and another friend. The second day I awake in a couch full of sand without any clue. But for some reason everybody I meet seems to remember me from the beach party in the preceding night. I tend to associate this behaviour with the social capabilities of the arak :-)

Anyway, a series of coincidences — typical of the hospitality-exchange world — lead me on the next day to a small kibbutz on the Dead sea (the relevant photos are here).

But the amazing discovery is that you can easily hitch hike to almost every place in Israel! You just wait in a some big junction — even in the middle of the desert! (Check the picture and count the cars on sight :-)

And you will realise soon that all class of people can pick you up: from the young religious to the SUV-family to the hippie couple in a dark green Punto (by the way, a big thank you goes to the Indian girl who translated the hindi inscriptions on my yellow bag).

So I grab my casetta and I start flashing the drivers approaching my spot with big smiles, and in virtually no-time I found myself in front of the walls of Jerusalem!

Welcome to the Holy Land

Bump!

I wake up when the plane hit the land — I mean the Holy Land :-) — and I start looking around me: I'm alone in the last row, the only goy in a plane full of happy and noisy Israeli families coming back from their Turkish holidays — the Shekel is kinda high, these days ….

My thought goes to the preceding hours — and I feel the nightmare slowly fading away. I arrived from Olimpos to Antalya very late the night before, I woke up early and I went to the airport. Turkey did not want to let me go: after discovering that I cannot go to Israel via Cyprus (because you cannot pass the border from North to South, and from Turkey you can only go to the Northern part) I somehow managed to sneak in an Israeli return charter. But, alas! the girl at the travel agency forgot to add my name to the flight list. After a couple of hours of frantic phone calls eventually I passed the check-in. Three minutes before it closed.

So, this is how Israel looks: … nice!

After discovering that I can pay the train ticket (2.50 €) with my credit card The Big Smile shows up on my face! And it gets wider when, first on the train and then on the bus, I realise that almost everyone — including the elder and the young — speaks English.

I happily settle down on my couch in Yafo while I let the hot air, the smells and the sounds of Middle-East slowly soak my body. In a few hours I realise that it will be hard to leave this place.

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As usual, more photos of Tel Aviv here.

Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò

And the quest for the sun leads me to Antalya, in the very south of Turkey, and my thirst of blue would eventually be satisfied (see photos).

But the curse of the Ramazan Bayram (see this post) is still there: both of my hosts in Antalya are leaving for the holiday, and I grab the opportunity of see Olimpos, just around the corner.


So i grab a dolmuş to the bus staion, there the dolmuş to Olimpos, that leaves us to the main street, and from there — guess — a dolmuş to the city. City? Oops! There is no city: the place is just an agglomeration of pensions and bars lined on both sides of the only street that leads through the ruins to the beach.


But some of the pensions are of a peculiar kind: tree houses! Feeling my age slowly flowing away, I climb on the ladder to my new home.

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More photos of Antalya and Olimpos here.