Saturday, July 12, 2008

A settler in the desert

Maurizio, the Mexican visual artist who I’d met the other day, called me up out of the blue and said that he was going to the Dead Sea this morning and if I wanted to come then I should meet him downtown in 30 minutes. I’d been asked before if I wanted to go but had shelved the idea as I was afraid that it would turn into a quite an uncomfortable day, a bit like being baked in a hot oven. Now that Maurizio had called me up I thought, why not? We were also meeting a Norwegian guy, Henrik, who had been involved in establishing the art academy here in Ramallah. I phoned Pola and she wanted to come as well. It was a journey only for people with foreign passports, and so now we were four people in the car. Palestinians don’t have any access to the Dead Sea even though it’s in the very heart of the occupied territories and you can actually see the Dead Sea from the higher areas of Ramallah. That’s just the way it is.

Maurizio had borrowed Khaled’s car, which had Jerusalem number plates, so we were set for a day on the beach. We drove through the incredibly beautiful desert landscape east of Jerusalem, with its tall white hilltops and very primitive Bedouin villages scattered here and there. Ramallah lies some 1000 meters above sea level, so it was a long drive downhill to the Dead Sea which is about 500 meters below sea level. It is the lowest land in the world. That’s crazy to think about. Along the road there were signs informing us that now we were at sea level, now 200 below sea level, now 400 below, etc. Then the entire Jordan valley opened in front of us and we could see Jericho and the mountains in Jordan on the other side. We drove through two checkpoints and took the exit by the first beach resort we came to.

Everything was very Israeli, with light blue and white flags everywhere. We had to climb down several sets of stairs to get down to the beach where there were some large tents without sides to provide shade. As the temperature was probably above 40 Celsius, sitting under such a baking sun would have been a sure-fire death. The sand was so hot that it was a question of sprinting to the water in order to swim. I had also left my sandals at home. Henrik told me that it was dangerous to get the salt water into your eyes, ears, nose and mouth. If this happened I had to hurry up to the shower and rinse it all out. The water was so salty that it felt like acid when it got up your nose. It was a unique experience to swim in such salty water. It was simply impossible to sink and it was a struggle to keep your feet on the bottom so I was quickly lying on my back on the surface of the water enjoying the incredibly beautiful landscape that was visible on the other side of the Dead Sea. The mountains rose sharply here and rested majestically, visible through the hot haze, with small villages dotted here and there on the mountainside.

The next step when bathing in the Dead Sea is mud. In some places the beach floor is soft and velvety. This is where you can find the black mud that is supposed to be so healthy for the skin. It’s quite a crazy sight to see all the beach goers smearing themselves with black mud. Apart from there being something primal about covering oneself in mud, there is also something slightly autoerotic with all the smearing of your own body. You end up entirely black from the mud. When all the skin is covered up you have to wait for the mud to dry into a dry hard shell. I had got quite a lot of mud in my hair which quickly turned into a kind of crash helmet on my head. The great cleansing effect of the mud is only felt once you’ve rinsed it all off. Your skin becomes soft like a baby. Later, I also become red like a baby after daring to be in the sun for 10 minutes.

When we returned to the car after a few hours on the beach, the car was so hot that it was impossible to get into it. Maurizio had to use a towel to cover the steering wheel in order to use it and sweat was dripping off all of us. We drove back up through the desert but the car started to cough when the hills got steeper. Finally, when we reached the top of a hill, it just gave up entirely. Here we were, stuck in the middle of the desert on a heavily trafficked road. What the hell were we going to do? None of us knew much about cars but we managed to open the motor hood and tried to pour water on the cooler. It swallowed one litre after another until we finally didn’t have any left, which isn’t exactly that great when you’re stuck in the middle of a desert.

However, people started to stop. Firstly, a large American Chevrolet boxcar stopped; the driver came out with a container of water and poured about four more litres on the cooler without it looking any fuller. The Chevrolet had a large sticker on the back with a big Israeli flag, so we knew that we were dealing with a real life Israeli. Other cars stopped to give us water, too, but our guy with the Israeli flag was persistent and tried all kinds of things to get the car started without any success. He didn’t know a word of English so everything happened through using sign language. Once he’d concluded that the car was dead, he took out a rope from his big vehicle and tied the two cars together. We were invited into the Chevrolet while Maurizio would steer the shipwrecked car; and, as far as we understood, he was going to tow it to the nearest gas station. We were all very thankful and did all we could to express that, but it was also a bit strange to be helped by an Israeli who was so obviously waving the Israeli flag. We didn’t tell him that we were going to Ramallah and just said we were going to Jerusalem instead. For many Israelis, Ramallah equals war and shootings so we didn’t want to tempt fate. We didn’t discuss it between ourselves so it was obviously a common feeling amongst us.

When we got to the gas station, it turned out that the guy was himself a mechanic and he called a friend who could speak English. He wanted to fix the car at his shop in Ma’ale Adumim which is one of the mega-settlements just outside Jerusalem. Khaled would never be able to pick up his car from there. We just stood there looking at each other for a while and at the ‘This Week in Palestine’ journal that was lying in the back window of the car. All the while a camel was standing high above on a hill behind us, munching slowly. We finally decided to give the man our keys so he could pick it up the next day and take it to his body shop. He wrote on a note that it would costs 1,900 shekels (about 300 British pounds) to repair it. We would just have to talk to Khaled about what to do. Right then, we were in a gas station in the middle of the desert and didn’t have many other options. We got the phone number from the settler and he offered to drive us to Jerusalem, which was great. He sped down the road and just said ‘Shalom’ at the checkpoint without stopping (something I had never experienced before) and drove us to The American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. The situation changed slightly here as we’d thought that he was just being a nice guy, but as we got out of his car he demanded money for the journey and wanted us to pay him 500 shekels (about 80 British pounds). We tried to explain to him that he’d never told us that he would charge us for the trip. We discussed our situation a bit and finally handed him 200 shekels which must have been about what a taxi ride would have cost, but his help was suddenly cast in a different light and our already mixed-up feelings about the situation turned another somersault.

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