Desert Living

I know, I know. I’m a rotten blogger. I keep my audience (read: Sean, my sister and two of my closest friends) hanging for days. I’m gonna have to steal my dear friend Eufemia’s excuse (not only do I neglect my readers but now I steal from other bloggers!) for not writing her blog from India: “a cow ate my blog!” She claimed. What would be an Israeli equivalent to that? Hmmm. A street cat tore it to pieces? (they’re arguably more common in Tel Aviv than cows in India.)
Screw it.

I’m gonna tell the truth.

I’ve been really busy. There is simply not enough time in the day to read all the books and essays about Yemeni Jews, visit all the libraries and museums I must visit, interview everyone I need to interview, make some cash (cleaning houses and working at my brother’s office once a week) and still have time to enjoy a night out with friends, a family dinner, write, travel the country, exercise. I’m totally overwhelmed.

Then a few days ago rare heat wave came our way, all the way from Libya, or Algiers, or some other North African country who doesn’t talk to us, crossing impassable borders, seas and mountains and settling on the country like a heavy blanket. It’s not even spring yet and suddenly the temperatures rose up to 34 degrees in Tel Aviv. One day we were wearing jackets, the next flip flops and t-shirts.

So we figured it was too hot to do anything, packed the car and headed to Eilat.

Eilat is the southernmost city in Israel, bordering Egypt and Jordan. A desert city by the red sea, it’s a world class tourist destination, known for its marine park and coral reefs which makes it a scuba divers’ paradise. Red mountains soar around it, a striking contrast to the clear blue sea and the white sand beaches. Back when I lived in Israel, Eilat’s beaches were filled with topless Scandinavian tourists and dark skinned local boys who preyed on them. Today, for some reason, it’s packed with French and Russian tourists and they usually keep their tops on.

Eilat is Israel’s very own Vegas, minus the slot machines and with beaches, and like Vegas it is a manmade oasis in the desert, a strip lined with luxurious hotels and flashing neon.

I’ve always loved the drive to Eilat. Growing up, our small country felt like an island, surrounded with countries we weren’t allowed to enter. Eilat was as close as going abroad as you could get. It was four and half hours away from Tel Aviv, and in a country you could cross in two hours going east to west, and seven from north to south, it felt really far.

The landscape changed quickly, leaving green and moist Tel Aviv to the dry and arid desert. The cities we crossed, Beer Sheva, Dimona, were sand castles in the horizon, even their trees appeared yellow, covered with the wandering sand. Past those cities, the desert grew mountainous, canyons and cliffs rose and fell, and the view from my window turned from yellow to blushing red. Eventually, at the end of a long dusty road along the Jordanian border, we could see Eilat, a little sparkling blue stain, surrounded with big hotels, monsters of concrete that are the stepchildren of the desert.

I have a soft spot for Eilat, a city that young hip Israelis love to hate because it’s overrun by ugly hotels and gaudy neon signs. I secretly like Eilat, and not just because of the gorgeous beaches and the beautiful Red Sea. I have a soft spot for it because once, when I was a teenager, it was my home away from home. When I was in high school, before I could travel outside of the country, I discovered that four and half hours on a night bus from Tel Aviv took me to a different land, with a different climate, where no one knew me, where I could reinvent myself. First I went with some girlfriends, slept in a sleeping bag on the beach and partied at night. Then the summer before twelfth grade, Tal – my best friend and also a teen journalist – and I were sent to write about a scuba diving course in Eilat. The diving club was on Coral Beach, a short bus ride away from the busy strip, and we spent all our days diving and sun tanning and all of our nights hanging out on the beach with our diving buddies.

The beach was overlooking the lit shore of Aqaba, Jordan’s Eilat. Local Eilati once told me how they used to see King Hussein’s boat sailing from Aqaba, approaching the territorial sea border between Jordan and Israel. The king would wave at the Israeli boats with his charming smile and then sail away. Tal and I sat there at night and looked at the water, hoping to see the King’s boat. It was a few years before Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement. Today, Israelis can visit Aqaba, and look at the lit shore of Eilat from the other side.

I loved the diving club and I loved Eilat. I was intoxicated by the freedom, surrounded with tourists from around the world I could pretend to be a traveler myself, a tourist in my own country. I came back almost every holiday, and always stayed in the youth hostel by the diving school. I often went alone, because everybody already knew me. Handsome sun kissed diving instructors would flirt with me and buy me drinks. Sometimes I’d even miss school and go there for a couple days.

I used to love coming here in winters, when Tel Aviv’s streets were littered with puddles and the Mediterranean Sea was dreary and grey. Sean, who spent a winter here once, working on a boat, says that a typical winter in Eilat is generally better than a Vancouver summer. He also has a soft spot for Eilat. He lived here for an entire winter and it was the first time he worked on a boat. When we drive around Eilat we actually argue about directions and he has a say!

I have a soft spot for Eilat because I have many good memories from here. It was on a beach in Eilat, on a warm winter night, where I had my first kiss.

I was here with Tal the day the first gulf war officially began. We came for a scuba diving conference, accompanied by our gas masks, which we were ordered to take everywhere with us in case of a chemical attack by Iraq. I made mine into a collage because the ugly brown box didn’t go with my style. It was a good time to be in Eilat. An attack on Eilat was highly unlikely, since it was so far from Israel’s centre. The atmosphere at the diving club was almost high spirited. “Eat, drink and make love because tomorrow we’ll die!” The young instructors announced with a chilled beer in hand. Others said that if a chemical missile was to hit Eilat they would go underwater with a tank full of air. No need for gas masks or shelters! It was so relaxed that I didn’t want to go back; such a contrast to Tel Aviv where you breathed panic and fear. And sure enough, a day after our return, the first missile fell on our city. I pulled the straps on my gas mask so tightly that I had bruises on my chin the next day. I really wished I stayed in Eilat.

We arrived at Eilat before sunset. The red mountains bled onto the city. Lights dotted the hotels, and lined the seawall and the air smelled like cocoa butter. Red-faced tourists filled the bars, beer was poured and live music played on the sidewalks.

As soon as we stopped by a motel, hawkers surrounded our car like vultures, trying to get us to rent their suites. After seeing a couple of unappealing suites we took one that seemed decent. Only to discover as the hours passed, that the light in the bathroom is flickering erratically (“I’m gonna get a seizure!” I cried,) the door to the balcony doesn’t lock (“It’s like any other hotel,” the guy told me when I called, “you shouldn’t be leaving valuables in your room.”) The electric kettle didn’t work, the fridge was filthy, the remote didn’t work, and everything was covered in a layer of dust. None of it was apparent at a first look. You really shouldn’t judge by appearance.

We moved the next day to a nicer place and our vacation finally began.

Even though it’s been 18 years (how is that even possible??? I must have been a baby then) since my diving course I still always go back to the Coral Beach, to the same diving club. I don’t know where else to go. Located on the road to Egypt, it is far enough from the main strip and its tourist attractions to keep me sane. I’m always scared that next time I’ll come the place would be different. Of course it changed over the years: a nice hotel and a coffee shop with a terrace were built across the street, and the diving club now has a bar on the beach with wooden stools surrounding it, where they pour tap beer and make espressos. Still it remains a better alternative to Eilat’s hotel strip, especially since they built that huge mall at the entrance (which I admit, is a great air conditioned bubble for these insane summer days when the temperature reaches 45 degrees and you’d rather die than walk the streets. In fact, you might actually die if you did. I’ve only ever felt that feeling in Montreal, when the temperature went down to minus 40 and I realized that being out might actually kill me. That kind of danger in the air is something we rarely feel in temperate Vancouver, where the weather is always agreeable, never a silent killer.)

There’s only one diving instructor from my days who still teaches in the club and he always says hello to me when he sees me. I’m sure he has no idea who I am, but still, it makes me feel good about myself. We also know the owners (but only from our visit two years ago,) Craig, a Canadian man from Vancouver (!) who followed his Israeli British wife to Eilat. They’re a cool couple and have been living in Eilat for the past 16 years, raised a family here and everything.

On Friday night, after sipping some beer on the beach with Craig, we went to have a Shabbat dinner at my cousin Ratsi, who’d been living in Eilat for the past 14 years with his Norwegian wife Lisa and their three beautiful children. Their eldest, 14 year old Naomi, a champion wind surfer, was off to a competition she surely won. Next door, in a place called ‘the shelter’, Sudanese refugees from Darfur were playing music and singing praises to Jesus. It was nice background music to a traditional Jewish dinner. Ratsi and Lisa’s last apartment had a view of Aqaba, and to get there you had to tell the taxi driver ‘Block A, above the dentist.’ Eilat is such a small town (apart from the hotel strip area) that it has very few street names. Most houses are numbered, or in that case, known by a certain attribute.

“Why Eilat?” I asked Ratsi after dinner, as we sipped black coffee and cracked nuts.
“When I was living in Norway,” Ratsi said, “I used to look at the white plains, covered in snow, and it kind’a looked like a desert. And I fantasize that it was desert. And it was hot. And I decided that when I get back to Israel I want to live in the desert. Have a place that is relaxing, slow paced.”

I suddenly remembered how I had the same fantasy. I loved the desert when I was a teenager, I imagined myself living in a big house with huge windows facing red mountains. I thought it was the most beautiful view in the world. I remembered how being in the desert was the only thing that relaxed me, that made me happy. It was my escape.

Somehow, I ended up in Vancouver instead. It’s funny, because my sister who always liked cool temperate climates ended up living in the desert, in Arizona.

I look at Craig and Dafna, Ratsi and Lisa, all of them not native to this weather. They seem happy and relaxed here. Their kids seem happy, running around on the beach in the middle of winter, wind surfing and scuba diving. I wonder if I could live in the desert. If I could take the heat, the dust, they dry air. Maybe I was on to something back then?

One great benefit of desert living is that the dry air always makes for no frizz. My hair never looked better! “Why do you think I moved to Arizona?” My sister said when I commented on that. “Everyday in the desert is a great hair day…”