My Northwestern friend Danielle Borschnack and her sister Melissa have been keeping me company throughout my first week in Jerusalem. While I’ve spent long hours in class, they’ve been bouncing around the country, hitting the major sites. Fortunately for me, there is no class on Fridays, so I was able to join them on their final adventure down south into the desert.
Earlier in the week, they’d met a local, Evan, who they’d convinced to guide them around the Judean Desert, particularly to Masada and Ein Gedi, two points nearby the famous Dead Sea. Early Friday morning we boarded a bus from the Central Station in Jerusalem to our first stop — Masada, a picturesque mountaintop that was the site of a mass suicide in the first century.
The stop at Masada took longer than anticipated. Since the entire country of Israel shuts down mid-day on Friday to observe the Jewish Sabbath, we realized we could not make it up to the Dead Sea beaches or the hot springs at Ein Gedi if we were to waste time waiting for the next bus on the irregular desert route.
Evan was not discouraged as he walked us down to the highway amid the mid-summer desert heat. He explained that times like these are when Israelis turn to hitchhiking, a practice I’d almost consider barbaric in America but is a common mode of transportation here. He continued to explain that you could learn a lot about the society through the people who stop and offer rides.
The first pair to stop for us was an Israeli couple, probably in their early forties with a car-seat in the back of the car. They spoke miserable English but refused not to practice and take advantage of the two Americans in the back of their car. “I tell you, one year, you have most better Hebrew than me.”
Second was a wild young pair of German tourists. They had wet clothes flung around their car as they sped by crunching sunflower seeds between their teeth. They said they were trying to see the entire country today, and were on their way four hours north to the Golan Heights.
Once we arrived at our rocky beach destination, I had to agree with Evan, I felt like a rugged adventurer who knew the country a bit better. Here’s some wisdom I gained about Israeli hitchhiking:
- It is proper to stand close to the road (or in the road depending on traffic) with an arm extended and a finger pointing at the road. Giving a thumbs up is offensive.
- Girls have better luck than boys. Evan, the expert hitchhiker, once hiked up his shorts out of boredom and frustration after waiting an hour and a half for a ride. Although he only got a honk from a driver headed in the other direction, he was confident that had he been female, it would have changed his fate.
- Don’t buy a round trip bus ticket if you’re planning on hitching the return trip. But really, who would do this? Oh, oops.
- If a car pulls over that looks suspicious and you don’t want to board, ask them where they are going first. This gives you the easy way out of saying you’re headed anywhere but there.
- Even if you spend an hour standing in the middle of a two-lane desert highway waiting for a ride, chances are you will still get there faster than if you take the rare bus.
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