On Kibbutz Ketura

Each week, Aardvark takes a tsiyur, or trip, to heighten our cultural understanding of Israel, yadda yadda. To be completely honesty, they're a bit boring. This week, however, we did a vacation-style tsiyur to a kibbutz down south for a couple nights. We lodged in the guest house there, which is basically a hotel, but isn't a hotel...know what I'm saying?

Happy Noah at Kibbutz Ketura

Anyways, we left at seven Tuesday morning, napped through the bus ride (which took us on interstate 1 through the West Bank, and then down south on route 90 along the Dead Sea). We got situated at the kibbutz…my room was Andy, Ari, Oscar, Jacob, and myself. Good group. Tuesday was pretty nondescript. We learned about the kibbutz (it's a "green" kibbutz with a pretty big solar field adjacent to it, wiki), did some "organic gardening", consisting of digging trenches in the dirt and filling them with straw, and got lectured one too many times. Tuesday night was where it was at. We had a poolside barbecue, night swimming, and schmoozing. The lifeguard on duty was on Year Course (the original Aardvark, similar program), so after she got off , she brought a few of us up to a bonfire that all the year course kids were having.

Gardening with Oscar

The bonfire was really cool, although it was facilitated by their madricha, so it's not quite like it was of their own volition. Whatever. It was pretty far away from the kibbutz on the desert plain, so I can now say I've been to a bonfire in the desert. The stars out in the desert at night were something else. I'd place them a notch above The Berkshires, but below Montana. Afterwards, we all went back, hung out a bit outside their residence and met some of the other kibbutz people. There were some pretty interesting volunteers there, and a bunch of South Americans doing some strange program in Israel…didn't quite understand their story. I'm kicking myself that I didn't get a picture of the table they all chilled around. A volunteer some time back wrote a list of "rules" to follow on it that served as their commandments. I can't quite remember what they said, something along the lines of, "learn to love arak", "put your shoes in your suitcase, take them out when you leave", "have sex in the pool at least once", "look at the stars every night before bed", etc.

Downtime

Wednesday morning we did activities we signed up for the night before. I signed up for "film-making", which as it turns out was definitely the best choice. Basically we went around making a really fucking dumb movie about a killer that kills people with spoons; I was a recurring character that kept dying, similar to Kenny from South Park. It was pretty goofy. We had some down time during the day, so Oscar and I jammed a bit with Daniel, a Year Course kid (I lugged my djembe down to the kibbutz).

At about 4:00, the tour guide brought us all into the desert. At this point, both Ari and I were pretty pissed at all the group stuff that had been going on. I felt a bit coddled. So we basically went to the front of the group for the hike and left the tour guide behind us. We all rendezvoused at this shed at the foothills of the Red Mountains in the Negev (about fifteen minutes from the Kibbutz).

Foothills...I climbed up the mountain in center frame

Then something pretty cool happened. We were to do a "solo desert experience". Basically, we went ot on our own to an isolated spot in the desert (an issue I'll address in a second), turn off our cell phones and be completely silent and sit for a half-an-hour or so and write if we felt like it. He told us not to go too far, not to climb up the mountain, etc. Well…I really wanted to climb the mountains. When we were in Ein Gedi, we never actually summited a peak, so my hiking senses were tingling. I needed to see what was on the other side of these mountains. I think about a quarter of the way into my hike, I would have been considered too far away for safety's sake. Impulses kicked in, and I guess I just took off. Basically I started my trek by going up this rock-scramble in a gully of the mountain face. Things got a bit too steep, so I started to traverse, and that's basically how I got up the mountain: hiking until it got too steep and then traversing.

Found this dwelling on my way up the mountain, nestled in a ravine (phone quality)

View from top: Ketura in foreground, Arava Valley, Jordanian Mountains in background

Well I got to the top in about fifteen minutes (I booooked it), so I had a fair amount of time left, maybe an hour or so. I sat on top of this ten meter cliff on the top of the mountain, meditated a bit, wrote a little and tucked my writing into a crevice in the cliff-face. And I decided to continue. The wide desert plain called me. I started to wander away from everyone, and sat in the middle of the desert, not hearing a sound besides the wind in my ears, not seeing a person, no life, no sign of life other than one road. It was incredibly serene. I could see in the distance (really not too far away) a strikingly similar set of mountains as the one I just climbed, so I decided to do the whole thing again. This time was a bit easier, as there was a desert road (one lane, 4x4 is a must) snaking up the mountain that I followed. And I could see everything…To my east lay the Arava Valley, behind it the Black Mountains of Jordan. To my south was more mountains, and a gentle slope down. Had it not been so muggy, I'm sure I would have been able to see the Red Sea and Eilat. To the south-west lay more mountains, a bit smaller than the set I was on, directly west was the desert plain, a flat, rocky, lifeless expanse that Moses wandered through for forty years. To the north was a road, more mountains, and a communications array situated on the tallest peak in my view. It was a fucking panorama.

 

Desert road (http://g.co/maps/pzqzu)

Now is where I got in a bit of trouble. The sun started going down, and I was daaamn far away from everyone else. So I booked it down the desert road, across the desert plain, to the face I scrambled up. I got there, and said to myself, fuck this, I'm not about to die. Going down that slope would not have been safe. To my north-east lay a mountain with a power line tower on top of it, and up this mountain was a path, so I decided to walk across the plain to the mountain. Shit took forever. It was really much further away than I thought, and there were tons of prominences along the way that I mistook for the desert plain, so I had to double-back maybe three times on that journey. I got to the top, walked down the path, and got a call (I left my phone on) from Paula, our madricha, screaming, saying everyone has been waiting over half an hour for me. Shiiiit. So basically I sprinted down this path and back to them, coming in at a hefty forty minutes late. Thank god I wasn't the only one that was late, apparently a group of people that summited the largest mountain of the "front range" were in the same boat as me (climbing things they shouldn't have been, going way too far, and coming back late). Well they were pissed, and we apologized profusely, and I guess things were mended up at least enough for all of us to go about living.

Trail down

They then brought us to the same place we had a bonfire the night before and taught us how to make pita over a fire. It was pretty neat, and really yummy. We headed back and chilled for the rest of the night, meeting some more of the volunteers and hanging out with Year Course kids. It was a fun night.

I think the bike ride is what really pissed my madricha off. Basically, Aardvark went on a bike ride around the Kibbutz and area, and while we were waiting for everyone to get suited up for biking, I asked Paula if I could jump off this ledge. A resounding, "NO". Well, ADHD kicked in, and when her back was turned, I jumped it, landed it a few times, and, as she turned around, mid jump, I crashed (baby crash), and she freaked. So I didn't get to go on the bike ride. Damn. And that's basically that. I had another conversation with them and got reprimanded a bit, and explained to them how I'm pretty impulsive and I'm trying to work on that and all, and things seem okay now, although they're worried about me, which is not a great position for me to be in. Oh, and they emailed my parents, so now I have to deal with that.

The bike ride I didn't get to go on

Well Kibutz Ketura was quite the tsiyur. I might end up back there now that I know people there; I'd probably be able to crash, but to be honest, there are a few hundred other kibbutzim to visit, and I'm damn glad to be back in Jerusalem.

I should be getting to volunteering. I switched to work at the Lone Soldier Center, basically a non-profit established to provide a "family" to solders here without any family. The boss was going to be an hour late, so I went down the street to this cafe and I just finished my iced coffee. And I'm back on Facebook. I gave in. Phooey.

Minnesota, WI - Bon Iver & True Love Waits - Radiohead