As with last time, El Al packed us in like sardines. (Of course, since the plane had been “koshered for
Passover”, the sardines had to have been kosher too!). There were a number of children which concerned us a little but it became obvious that Israeli parents behave better than South African parents, and the kids were very well controlled on the whole. All this excludes the lady sitting behind Rob who kicked his seat periodically through the flight.
After take off we were given our special meals – what was interesting was that when the hostess came along to ask us if our names were Hackenbruch, we then discovered thatthey had written this in Hebrew, well now we have yet another spelling of our surname.
Jen had a fruit platter with a salad, strawberries, oranges, dates, etc; whilst Rob had a chicken “thing” with potatoes and an aubergine sauce.
Then the fun started …. Jen managed to get to sleep fairly easily (what’s new?); Rob on the other hand squirmed and wriggled but could not get to sleep, He very gently (his words, not Jen’s), but a little frustratedly, woke Jen to swop seats so he could sleep against the window, only to discover that this was worse … he woke her up a again to swop back again! No sooner had this happened when finally, the sleeping pill he took kicked in … (well, that’s HIS story …)
We woke at about 4am to discover our food trays down and our breakfast in front of us, and by the time we finished breakfast and had all the stuff cleared away we came in for landing.
The long trek from the plane through passport control was uneventful but the walking was a foretaste of the next three weeks. We had to wait a while for our luggage though. The “fun” with the luggage was that all bags look the same shrink-wrapped …
After picking up a cell phone from Pelephone (we decided to buy one instead of hiring as the deal was better), we fetched the car from Eldan and were given a Kia Rio. Rob gloated with great glee when the luggage fitted in the boot with lots of extra place for the hand baggage as well. (He didn’t say “I told you so” otherwise he’d have a black eye to complement his smirk!)
We sucessfully navigated out of the airport and got on the road to Tel Aviv. On the highway or should we say the “crawl way” we found the right exit and got to the general area of Old Jaffa. Driving on the right seems so wrong but between us we did not cause any accidents.
Old Jaffa was a little disappointing. It could be seen that it had once been restored but had become a bit
seedy and run down. Not many places were open and a number of the buildings were in a sad state of repair. The visitors centre is built around an excavation ranging from the Canaanite period to the Roman period. A video showed an interesting history ofJaffa. Rob really shouldn’t call it interesting, considering he slept through most of the 15 minutes show until he had such a big “snap back” that his sunglasses fell off the back of his head!! At least he didn’t snore, although Jen kept her dozing for later.
Conquered by the Eqyptians, timber landed atJaffafor the building of theFirstTemple; Jonah set out from here on his fateful date with a whale; and Peter the apostle received a vision to take the gospel of Jesus to the non-jews. These are just a few of the significances ofJaffa.
face, hidden behind a packet of food, was seen … Gareth having discoveredJaffa’s answer to “Wacky Wednesdays”!!). For the rest of you, this is a “Whalley” comment – Gareth works with Rob and coincidentally happened to be on the same flight as us with his girlfriend.
We had a great lunch at a street café. The waiter offered us a “hummus
platter” which turned out to be 4 huge pitas with about 8 appetisers in separate dishes; including hummus, roasted aubergine, mixed onions with tomato base, yoghurt and aubergine dip, cole slaw, potato salad with pickles, pickled cabagge, cucumber, cooked herbed carrots, and a few falafel balls (deep fried hummus). This was followed by our main course of lamb skewers for Rob and a WHOLE fish for Jen – head, eyes, fins & tail! Rob would have loved to have taken a photo of her face when her plate arrived! It was a great lunch all the same.
We then navigated our way, with a few unintentional detours, to Tel Aviv, parked in a parking garage and walked through the city center. It’s a “different” city where most buildings are only 3 or 4 stories high however there are still a number of sky scrapers as well, mainly hotels. The streets are quite narrow often only 3 lanes wide and with wide tree-lined pavements, with numerous coffee shops spilling out onto the 
pavements. A whole range of people, and a whole range of shops. Two things we found interesting were that the “pedestrian is king” – cars stop to let pedestrians over the road and the pedestrians step straight into the roads without fear. Secondly was the amount of people walking around the city with their dogs (which made both of us miss Patch and Kelev even more …..)
Again after another detour we got onto Route 20 north on the way to Sdot Yam … now that was frustrating! We were both extremely tired with Rob getting grumpier by the minute (at last proving Kathryn’s nickname of “grumpy ballie”). The “navigator” fell asleep every few minutes and missed reading the numbers on the map, which of course didn’t help matters and the grumpiness increased, so Kathryn, its now “Really Grumpy Ballie”. After a phone call or two to the Kibbutz we finally arrived. Needless to say we crashed… only to wake just in time to see the sun going down over the Med…. We ate bagels in our room (which we had bought during a quick stop in Netanya).
Sunset over the Med
On the whole a very tiring day, we didn’t do as much as we would have liked, but tomorrow is another day with Mount Carmel, Rosh Hanikra and others to look forward to, not least to arriving at Lake Kinneret
(Sea of Galilee) for three nights.
Toda raba, layla tov! (Thank you, good night). Day 2