Tag Archives: Israel/Lebanon border

Apr 9 2011

Rosh HaNikra railway line, caves and border crossing

This view shows facing southwards from the most extreme north coastal point of Israel.

This is Rosh Ha Nikra (meaning Head of the Grottos)  a place of natural beauty, containing not only natural caves, but a museum built on the site of a railway line which goes from Israel through Lebanon through to Turkey built by the British in WWII, not running any more of course!

There is a nearby Kibbutz, the white tent you can see in the distance is a banana plantation, apparently British Jewish comedian who created Borat and Bruno characters Sacha Baron Cohen once lived here.

The left field has all the fruit picked.  The right hand one shows the bunches of bananas has blue plastic bags round them to keep out insects and birds, as well plastic sheeting around the whole field.  Means the fruit doesn’t have any chemicals on them instead.

The entrance to the cable cars and visitor centre.

Amusing looking warning signs in the cable car, the journey down was something like two minutes or so I think.

The tunnels, long since blocked off, as its impossible to cross over to Lebanon through the regular borders, carried trains all the way up through the middle east.  These days in holds a cinema screen and some chairs for a presentation showing the history of this railway route.

Ancient grafitti in Hebrew here, not sure of age, not so easy to see unfortunately from this picture, could be good to bring some crayons and paper and make some rubbings if you plan to come here.   On the right, some modern scribbles.

The caves are beautiful.

Traces of copper and iron in the caves, also some tiny fossils of creatures on the rock outside.

There is a very pleasant walk that winds around inside the caves and along the edges of the cliffs.

The border!  Beyond here is a military base, and a demilitarized zone, before you reach Lebanon.

Only 120Kms to Beirut, Lebanon!

www.rosh-hanikra.com

Mar 10 2011

Nahariya – The North coast!

After finishing visting Akko, I thought I would get back on the train, and head north one more stop.

Israel’s north bound railway comes to an end at this station.   There are a couple more towns above before you get to Lebanon.

A little worrying that this buffer stop looks not really adequate for the job, and on closer inspection appears to be leaning back a bit as it looks like its bumped at least once by a train.   Behind is a simple chain link fence and a main road.   Could do with a sand bank or something maybe.

There is as well, left behind pieces of track across the road that continue further north, as it once went all the way to Beirut, once upon a time.

In the centre of town, this big billboard shows “The resort for fun lovers” The blue and yellow pattern looks like a reverse Ukrainian flag, wonder if its influenced from immigrants from the ex-Soviet states.

From what I read, this city was found in the 1935 during the British Mandate period and became a city in 1961.

This river that flows out from the middle of the city to the Mediterranean is carrying a lot less water than it ought to, showing the urgency of the drought problem here.

A tank rotating gun section in the front of the garden of this hotel, upon closer look, there is a plaque in Hebrew which appears to be there in memorial or a young soldier who died in battle.   An unusual shrine maybe.

Nahariya has a pleasant selection of different shops and nice beaches, but it is quite touristy, there wasn’t much history I could find there.  I walked a couple of miles north up the beach toward a tall hill, as I wanted to find the ski lifts that go up and down some cliffs towards the Lebanese border, but I couldn’t see them, the hills ahead were probably a good 6/7 miles further ahead, so I decided to call it a day and get the train back to Netanya.  Discovered that I am going to those cliff tops with a short break with work in a month or so. 🙂

Haifa and mount Carmel next!

Jan 24 2011

Mount Hermon snow trip: Part 1, go forth north!

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

On Sunday I got up very early to meet with friends to get to the snow capped Mount Hermon.

This place is not so well known by non-Israelis, as its at the very extreme north east corner of country, where the borders are for Lebanon and Syria.

After a not so pleasant start of my phone waking me up at 4am, necessary given the time to get up there, after teetering around my flat to get things together and have breakfast without waking up other room mates, strangely probably because of the weather is quite cold also at this time, I decided to do a fast sprint for no real reason on my bike out of East Tapliyot all the way through central Jerusalem all the way up Jaffa Street to the main Jerusalem Bus Station only took just over 30 minutes, quite amazing consider how slow I normally pedal.

Once off the bus close to Rachel’s house, the sun was just coming up.   This trip came at a good time seeing I was disappointing in not seeing my dad up here and was also concerned about a lot of choices I have to make this year, so this excursion was a welcome change, one of a lot of blessings this week actually, getting over a stupid week-long cold another one, and also once at the bus station finding a coffee shop that was open there was another one.  I was just about to text my friend Dave to see if he was close and he was suddenly in the shop in front of me.

The drive up there is different from previous drives up north I have done.  It involved going back on ourselves to head down towards a bit of the Dead Sea, then up from the West Bank, on a main road that passes through some Palestinian towns, at times running parallel with the Jordanian border as this above picture shows.

As we overtake this Nissan Micra on the motorway, if you look really really carefully on the horizon you can see a faintly see Hermon.  Once you get as far as Tiberias, the white peaks on it start to become prominent.

This drive through a small but friendly Arab village up in the Galilee, we got some directions as we kept going higher and higher.  This town had a couple of interesting bronze statues that looked more like something from native American history I have seen in Arizona that from a Galilee Arab community.

This felt very different from any part of Israel I had been before…

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock