Marathon Day of Touring

Our first weekend here, and I had already seen so much of Galilee, and we weren’t about to take a day of rest. Sunday morning we set off to the coast of the Sea of Galilee. It only took about thirty minutes to get there, and my first glimpse of the sea was almost perfect as we weaved our way down the hills in the bus. We first stopped at a Franciscan Church which lay right on the coast, making sure to take plenty of pictures and touch the water. We then drove a little bit further up the shore to a Greek Orthodox Church on the Mount of the Beatitudes. Pictures simply cannot describe the view of the lake and surrounding hills of Israel and Jordan and the beauty of the Church. All the while at the different sites, there are so many people around from all over the world touring in big luxurious buses. These tour buses are all over the country as you can imagine. I slowly begin to realize that the pictures that I take and accounts that I tell of my trip and the sites can hardly do the real thing justice. This becomes even clearer as I try to explain the site of Capernaum. The entire ancient city was made of basalt stones, a porous, black, volcanic rock. That is all but the synagogue which was built with fantastic white marble. Today, a UFO-looking Church sits atop the believed location of an early Byzantine Church which are usually distinguishable by the layout of an octagon.
As the day was starting to get extremely hot, it came as great news to hear that our next stop would be to eat lunch and then swim in the Sea of Galilee. The shore is extremely rocky, but the floor softens to mud after stepping out a few meters. The water is also warmer than bath water, but cools down at a greater depth. At this point I was thinking that this was turning out to be a great day: not too much touring and time to relax at the lake were Jesus fished. Yet, much to my disappointment, the day was far from over. Our next stop would be the site of Hippos, an elaborate Roman turned Byzantine city on top of a mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The drive up the mountain was incredibly steep, and the absence of guardrails didn’t make any of us feel better. If that wasn’t enough, Hippos is in the territory known as the Golan Heights, which was obtained by the Israelis after the Six Day War. We were perfectly safe as long as we stayed on the path and behind the warning fences, but the area is still littered with land mines. But all of the obstacles were well worth seeing Hippos. I know that the Romans built and engineered greater things, but a city of that age on a mountaintop amazes me, and walking the same exact road that they built through the city is just that much better.
By then I was pretty tired, but we were told to press onward. Next stop, the Jordan River. There’s something wrong with that term because the Jordan is hardly a river, more like a creek, and it is even reduced to a trickle in some areas. This is due to the river’s use to fill huge reservoirs for the water that we use at the Kibbutz everyday. We actually pass one of these large lake-sized reservoirs everyday on our way to Khirbet Qana. I wasn’t baptized, but the water still felt great up to my waist as I jumped in to escape the heat. Certainly this must be the end of our day, but nope…we were off to the city of Tiberius to see the ruins of a synagogue. Seriously? I thought I was here for five weeks, not five days; we didn’t have to see all of the Galilee that day. Although the ruins were nice and displayed an amazingly well preserved mosaic floor, it had been enough. I had seen so much that day that I started to appreciate the ruins a lot less. Furthermore, we did not receive any instruction on the ruins and sites that we viewed. That was because Byron was off being filmed for a Discovery Channel documentary which will air this Easter Sunday…more on that later. Finally, it was time to rest up for a busy day at the site starting at 4:30 the next morning.