When planning my last week in Israel, I had come across a direct bus from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea beach of Ein Bokek – supposedly one of the nicest public beaches at the Dead Sea. Hence, I took a morning bus to Ein Bokek and was happy to discover a sandy beach waiting for me. Unfortunately there is no luggage storage, so I just had to carry everything to the beach. Some people were giving me funny looks, but I didn’t care! After all, I was here to float – and that’s what I did! The water is a nice turquoise blue and was a bit wavy that day, so I was floating around like a corc 🙂 There were no other backpackers though, so no one to take pics of me or join me in the fun.

So after half an hour or so, I showered, changed and got on the next bus to Masada where I was going to spend the night to climb Masada fortress next day for sunrise. The area looked really quite spectacular and made me get excited for the hike, especially when I met my room mates and trekking buddies Belinda and Valentine. We got up super early the next morning and were at the gate at the start of the snake path at 5am. Our hostel had told us that’s the opening time. Wrong. It only opened at 5.40am, so we spent 40 min waiting around while we could have still slept…. Grrrml. When we were finally allowed to start our hike, we were worried we might miss the sunrise, so raced up the mountain in something like 35 min. At least we had time to look around for THE best spot to view the sunrise like this! If only there were a sunrise… Unfortunately it was too misty so we did not get quite the spectacular view that Masada is famous for – however, it was still really cool and definitely worth seeing! The ruins at the top were larger than expected and we had to rush a bit to see it all, since we wanted to be back at our hostel in time for breakfast buffet…

Re-energized, we packed up our stuff and made our way to Ein Gedi, a beautiful national park further up North along the Dead Sea. It’s very pretty since within the dry desert landscape, there is a little oasis with lots of waterfalls. Belinda, Valentine and I hiked around the area for about 3 h or so, during which we really enjoyed the different views. Also, we went for a swim in the pools above the waterfalls. Nice and refreshing on such a hot day! Afterwards, I continued my way back to Jerusalem from where I had booked a tour to Hebron for the next day.