The Voyage of the Mighty Tenho: exploring the south of Israel

Monday, March 4, 2013

exploring the south of Israel

It's time to start the trip back east through the Med soon, but I have to admit, I don’t think we're quite ready to leave Israel. The weather is sunny and warm, great people in the marina, nice beaches nearby, and still more hiking trails we'd love to explore. About an hour from the marina are fields filled with fresh vegetables and trails, where we spent a day enjoying the Scarlet South festivals, when everyone celebrates the spring flowers. An hour further south is the Negev desert, where we saw ammonite fossils, an alpaca farm, more Nabatean ruins, a Nubian ibex, and blooming desert flowers. Our favorite was exploring Makhtesh Ramon, a geologic formation unique to the Negev desert, created when the soft inner rocks of a hill erode until the harder surface rocks collapse into something that looks like an enormous crater http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhtesh.

Going for a hike near the farm fields

Farm fields

Hugo & Noga check out the cauliflower

Fieldside flower

Praying mantis

Visiting an alpaca farm in the Negev desert

Looking down into the makhtesh

Desert in bloom

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John, Tessa, Hugo (12) and Maggie (9)

Having spent 10 years in DC, we moved onto the boat in June 2012, with the intent of sailing across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean for a year. As of June 2013, we've sailed from the U.S. (Annapolis, Maryland) to Bermuda, then to the Azores, to Lisbon and down the Atlantic coast of Portugal and Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, along the southern coast of Spain (with a quick trip to Morocco) to Ibiza, then Sicily, through the Corinth Canal and Greek islands, winter in Turkey, a few weeks in Israel, with a side trip to Egypt. After a month in the Adriatic in spring, we all sailed to the Azores, where mom, cat and kids left by airplane, leaving John and crew to bring the boat back home to the Chesapeake.