I spent last night floating in the Dead Sea until six am, and today on the West Bank. But before I write about those, I have a badly written story of abject horror and disaster from Israel to share.
Two nights ago my sister called our father to let him know I was dead. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the state shuts down for it. Every shop, every restaurant, every bar and every road is forcibly closed. Importantly for this story, there is no public transport and no taxi service. If you get stranded, there is no way back.
We had rented two bicycles: a 1980s Raleigh Chopper and a mountain bike. Our plan, after a day on the Tel Aviv coast, was to have a short evening sightseeing tour through the centre before returning to our hostel for dinner. But of course, nothing ever goes to plan.
At first it was exciting. With no traffic, the motorway becomes a playground for the city trikes, bikes, wheelchairs and pedestrians. We biked from Jaffa along the boardwalk, into central Tel Aviv, then, around roundabouts and over flyovers, onto the highway for miles, past synagogues, minarets, schools, parklands, crowds of hysterical children on stabilisers. Two hours in we stopped for a snack on a pavement. So far, so wholesome. What I didn’t realise when we started the journey back, was that I had left my phone there.
I thought I was leading us back to Jaffa. In fact, I was leading us the wrong way. Somewhere, not too far in, my sister lost sight of me. Using maps, she tracked her return journey and realised I was en route to disappearance. When she called me an agitated Israeli man picked up. She was not to know that he had found my phone, and assumed I was dead.
Meanwhile I continued to ride, oblivious. It was only a couple of hours later when I reached Netanya, a city twenty-eight miles from our hostel, that I noticed I was alone and no longer in Tel Aviv. It was at this point that I got a flat tyre and found myself stranded phoneless, mapless, lost and with no choice but to cycle back down the motorway. It is a hard task to describe cycling a sixty-mile roundtrip after several hours on a bike, half of it uphill, through darkness, parched with no water in Middle Eastern heat, with a dead tyre and no idea which direction you are travelling in. To cut a long story short, I am never going anywhere without a map ever again.
astrangerinyourmidst 