Desert Survival

It is very late here so I'm going to do my best to condense an awesome experience into a short post - my apologies if it leaves you wanting more, feel free to contact me and ask.

At 5:35 on Sunday morning, the alarm that Josh had set jarred us both into wakefulness. After showers, we threw on our Hanes' white tshirts, athletic shorts and hiking shoes, grabbed our lulav and etrog (that we had picked out ourselves in the market for them in Jlem - forgot to mention that) and siddurim and headed down to the busses waiting outside. Yerucham (my group), and Kibbutz (the others) boarded separate busses - each with their own guard - and started south. I fell asleep right away. We woke up in Beer Sheva where we davened shacharit at a local synagogue, and then ate breakfast. We got back on the bus and headed to Machtesh Ramon. By way of some background info, a machtesh is a crater that wasn't formed by impact, but by the collapse of ground due to the withdrawal of an ocean - or something like that. Our bus drove for about 20 minutes to the base of a steep (think 60 degree incline) hill. We met our guide, Michal, and she spoke to us for few minutes and then told us to hike on up. We were all dying by the top, but it was a great way to start out our hike. Michal talked a little more and then we continued hiking. We hiked about 6km up and down hill and over dry riverbeds (wadis) until we got to our campsite. We set up camp (grabbed our clothing bags from the trucks that drive them to our camp, as well as mats and sleeping bags from the truck and help set up dinner). Adam, Josh, Seth, Miri and I went hiking on our own up a nearby hill and spent some time hanging out up there, which was pretty cool. Then we came back down for dinner which was beyond delicious. Afterwards we had a bonfire and Josh pulled out his guitar and we sang and had marshmallows and everything was lovely. The moon made the sky very bright, but it was also very beautiful.

As an aside, the adults hiking with us were Cori and Noah, our staff, Tamir, our guard, who made aliyah from Dallas with his family when he was in high school and was my guard once in Jlem class and is just so much fun to joke with but also talk to seriously about Tzha"l and other things, Elkana, the assistant director of Nativ (with whom Jordana and I had an interesting discussion about the lack of paleontology in Israel), and Michal, our guide.

We got up early in the morning and davened and had breakfast. Then we loaded our stuff back on the trucks and headed off. the total hikage for the day was 14km, but lots of it was up and down mountains which was my favorite part. about halfway through, we walked past kibbutz and traded Elkana for Yossi (the director of Nativ). Everything was just so much fun. My hiking buddies were generally Debbie Kruger and Rachel Engelberg, both of whom I knew at Ramah and both of whom I'm getting much closer with now. They could keep up with me at the front and they were fun to be around so they made the hike so much better.

Michal kept us entertained with fun games and things that sort of came out of nowhere and seemed pointless, but when we played them they really enhanced our experience. We got to the campsite that night and had the same basic experience as the night before. We woke up in the morning and again had more of the same (except this time, Judah and I hung out with Yossi for a bit and I also hiked with my friend Shara). We made it to the summit of that day's mountain (our third summit of the hike, I think - the beauty sort of runs together), and had a trust walk with our eyes closed, and then spent time just listening to the silence. Tamir and David and I then threw a frisbee around on top of the mountain, and watched air force jets dip into the crater during training exercises. We headed down and once we reached the bottom we got into jeeps for a ride to our lunch spot for the day and to be picked up by our bus and head back up north. The ride back up was uneventful.

That night was a very lazy one because we were all exhausted, though it was nice to shower for the first time in three days. Yesterday, I had my first MDA training course which ran from 8am-5pm with a break for lunch. After MDA I saw Yemima and Senora Shapiro, two of my teachers from Schechter who were chaperoning the 9th grade trip to Israel (they are staying at Agron). After a quick hello to them I headed out with Jordana to scope out a place to watch the Matisyahu concert in Breichat HaSultan without paying the 200nis ticket price. We found a spot that was accessible via climbing on the walls of the Old City and bumped into our friends and brought them to our spot. We only stayed for a little bit, because nothing was really impressive about the concert, then we headed home. I napped from 10pm-12am and then went to Adam's room to watch the Yankees-Twins game with a bunch of my friends from Minnesota - the Yankees won!

Today was MDA from 8am-8pm which was torturous, but I'm still excited about the end result which makes the course slightly bearable. After the course ended we went out for a little but I came back to write this and get to sleep. Even though tomorrow is friday, we still have MDA from 8-12 - it's eating all my time! On the bright side, I now know how to administer CPR and do a lot of other cool stuff.

That's all for now - get excited for Simchat Torah!

Talk to you later,
Seffi