Our First Trip to Israel Together
B. Southern Leg:
Masada, the Dead Sea, and Ramon Crater
^ The view from our hostel near Masada. Very desert-y, and feels like Mars. We climbed up the "snake path" to Masada at 5am on January 1st, 2o18, to see the first sunrise of the year over the Dead Sea.
^ Masada! Getting up early was worth it. The blue puddle in the back is the Dead Sea. The mountains behind it are Jordan.
Herod the Great built palaces for himself on the mountain and fortified Masada between 37 and 31 BCE. According to Josephus, the siege of Masada by troops of the Roman Empire at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War ended in the mass suicide of 960 people, the Sicarii rebels and their families hiding there (from Wikipedia).
^ New friend.
^ The snake path from our hostel to the top of Masada. 960 feet of elevation.
^ View of Masada from the Bottom of the Snake Path.
^ The Judaean Desert.
< A brief pit stop in Sodom, where we ran into the salt pillar formerly known as Lot's Wife.
^ On our way south to Ramon Crater we saw a lot of industry on the shores of the Dead Sea.
^ More desert!
^ Overlooking Ramon Crater, which is neither an impact crater nor a volcanic crater. Rather, it's a makhtesh. It's about 1640 feet deep, 25 miles long, and 1.2 miles wide.
^ Inside the crater, on our way to see some old ammonites.
< We saw a whole wall of these. Adam learned the Hebrew word for snails: "Shab-Loo-Leem".
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^ More from inside the crater.