Elad’s blog

On Friday I planned to go to the desert. Ofir wanted to join, but didn’t wake up on time. By the time he was ready, it was already afternoon (at least, the way I count it: he would probably say it was morning, eventhough it was much closer to sunset then to sunrise), so we got in the car and headed south without really knowing where it would get us. Eventually, we got into the Southern Judean Plane, a.k.a. as “mound land”. We landed in a neat archaeological site, the Lachish mound.

Lachish, as some of you may know, was a remarkable city in biblical times (look for example, at Joshua 10, where Joshua conquers this city and hangs its king on a tree in a public occasion of a sort). Some of the most important archaeological findings in Israel were found here (the Lachish letters); Today, it is a relatively undeveloped mound.

Judean Plane is actually full of mounds. Ancient cities spot the place: Azeqa, Maresha (Beit-Gubrin), Gat, Lachish, and some more - virtually everywhere you look you see these huge archaeological mounds on the plane; the only one of them that is properly excavated is Beit-Gubrin (which is a very remarkable place, worth a few hours visit). Lachish was excavated a few years ago, but not fully developed to any decent level. It is one of the big misses of Tourism around - on every other place it would probably become a “world heritage site” or something, whereis Israel has so many of this stuff that it is simply ignored.

Without any reason: among the interesting things around there is a wall the Assyrians built on their siege of the city, some 2700 years ago (the most ancient in the middle east); remarkable city walls, gates and streets; a big palace (not much left of it now, but you can see how impressive it was), a huge well (some 50 meters deep, full of pigeons), and more.

All this is situated in an amazing scenery: it is the heart of Israel’s vine zone, and grapes just fill up the valley below. From the hill you have an observasion to the other mounds around, Hebron mountain, and more; below it, a valley full of vines and some other fruit-trees.

We didn’t stay there long - a bit less then an hour, I think (hey, it is just another mound, and it was close to sunset) - but it made me think a bit about how much more could be done to develop tourism in Israel. Actually - in many levels: I don’t think a tourist today can find a decent level of guidance in English, neither travel guides nor brochures in travel agent’ offices around the world; I think many sites need to be developed (in Lachish, for example, they put a wooden track a few years ago. Unless it is painted again, it will shortly crack and break); and many other things need to be changed. Someone in the tourism office should start doing his job.

On a different issue: this Friday I have a tentative plan to take my sister to Ein-Ovdat, a cool place in the Negev desert. Everyone is invited to join - it is one of these “essential Negev” routes (very easy, and suitable for kids too); Also, I could really use another car to facilitate making this extremely beautiful but not-so-circular route.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 9:57 and is filed under Travels, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.