Masada

The plan was to visit Masada AND float on the Dead Sea.  We just made it to Masada, with a stop at the "lowest point on earth" for lunch.  What was the delay?  Well, first we had to have our Israeli breakfast, which is like breakfast, lunch and dinner combined.  (More on that later, I hope.)   Then we discovered that our rental car GPS system was not properly showing us our route to Masada and we were in fact heading to Tel Aviv, in the opposite direction.  Why?  Because Israeli rental cars do not provide navigation for the West Bank, and you need to pass through a section of the West Bank to get to Masada. Luckily, Steven had downloaded a navigation program on our iPad, and that saved the day. But we still had to turn around and retrace our route. Our trip through the West Bank (again, this is the section under full Israeli control), was uneventful.  Young IDF soldiers waved us through checkpoints with nary a comment.  We did see the "separation barrier" that divides the Palestine and Israeli territories, however. 

After a 90 minute drive, we arrived at the Masada museum.  Now, we could have walked up to Masada on the "snake path" and a lot of people do.  It's a good workout.  But we were already late, so we took the four minute cable car ride up.  Much easier.  The cable car lets you out at Herod's Northern Palace.  Benjamin and I are overlooking the palace in the top photo.  Herod spared no slave to build a terraced winter retreat, complete with banqueting halls for visiting dignitaries, and a huge bathhouse and gymnasium.  He brought in fresco and mosaic masters from Italy to decorate.  The walls were made from dolomite mined right at Masada, but the architectural flourishes, like column capitals, were brought ready-made from Rome. It must have been something in its day.  

Herod built a few more palaces on the Masada plateau,  along with lots of storage rooms for his Italian wine and apples and Spanish fish sauce.  He also had numerous cisterns built that could hold up to 40,000 cubit meters of water.  In the bottom picture, you can see the enormous southern cistern.  It's 64 steps down to the bottom and is absolutely amazing. 

But Masada is best remembered for the hold out of approximately 1,000 Jewish rebels against the Romans, some 60 years after Herod's death.  The middle picture appears to be a boring landscape of the Judean desert, but it is actually a picture of the ramp the Romans tediously built over many months to get to the top of Masada.  And there it stands, 2,000 years later.  Find the people walking up the trail beside the ramp, and you get a sense of the size of the ramp. You can still clearly see the seven camps and seige walls that the Romans set up in the valley below.