The North of Israel

On Friday we went up north. First stop was the Caesarea National Park, which has the ruins of the city set up by King Herod.

The park has lots of ruins, and also a good museum explaining the history of the area.

A group shot by the harbour. It was constructed to be a major port – around 100,000 square metres in size. The constructed a reef by dropping bales of volcanic ash into the sea, which turns them into solid concrete.

We then went to the Aaronsohn House. They were a family who operated as a spy network in WWI for the British against the Turks.

27 year old Sarah Aaronsohn was captured and killed herself after four days of torture, so she would not reveal her colleagues.

Despite being way north of Jerusalem, we ran into a Cabinet Minister. She is with the Labor Party, and I think has the commerce facility. Despite Davidi being with Likud, he is very good friends with the Minister – they were hugging each other when they ran into each other. Israel is a very small place, like NZ.

We then went to the old city of Tsefat (aka Zefat and Safed). On the way we visited a couple of war memorials. At most tourist sites they have a machine which will play an audio recording in Hebrew or English. They were really good to listen to – giving you a five minute history of what happened there.

Tsefat is a very old city, and many Orthodox Jews live there. Almost every second building is a synagogue. It is one of four holy cities, along with Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias. We saw the (outside of the) former home of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who left in 1948.