Aliyah Blog 92: Hula Nature Reserve (and other travels up North)

Traveling on Chanukah

“Countdown until self-destruction: 10, 9, 8, 7, 5 …” “What happened to 6?” “Just kidding … 6, 5 …”

I skipped from 91 to 93 in the last blog entry so here’s 92, out of order. At 92 years old, Mel Brooks was given live tours.

Anyway, it’s Chanukah and for the first time ever I slept somewhere else and asked the Rabbi if the four of us should light only one menorah to limit the amount of fire in the AirBNB where such a thing is surely prohibited. He had trouble even grasping my question. When it came to lighting, I was in Tzvat and of course no host would be against us lighting 16 candles (in my heart will glow … for ever and ever I love you so).

The other thing about staying in Tzvat – on the main road in the old city, one out of every 20 buildings was numbered, maybe. Finally found our apartment building – went in – no numbers on any of the apartments – at all. There were two staircases, and it turned out we needed to go up the completely dark one – on the top floor was the Tzvat villa, the writing on the wall (thanks sefer Daniel), and we went in the unlocked apartment. Hmm … only one bedroom? Went upstairs – huge, huge room with conference table for ~20, jacuzzi, panoramic view. Something’s wrong.

Couldn’t reach the host. Called AirBNB. They reached him. We needed to go in another door which took us to the basement and well numbered apartments. We found ours – with the door unlocked. Seems no one needs to lock doors around here, though after a long day the idea of being a squatter in the first place crossed my mind for two seconds.

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Hula Nature Reserve

This is another one of those – really, this exists in Israel? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Even living here literally the best way to find places to go – and find out anything – is to ask people. Shout out to the sister-in-law for recommending this place. It’s almost an annoyance in the United States to ask people – we tell people, “just Google it”. Yeah well, two hotel websites in Tzvat didn’t work for booking so I went to AirBNB, a well-polished American website rather than <gasp> pick up the phone and call.

“Isn’t the country a desert” said an older relative who learned that in Hebrew school years and years ago. No. That’s only part of it. Israel has everything except maybe tropical jungle. This is the Hula Valley at the north end of the country:

These are the golf carts you can rent to drive around the 1 km² the Agmon Hula lake – takes about 30 minutes with no stops in a golf cart. There are plenty of places to stop and enjoy.

The lake used to be about 12 km² until drained (I don’t know why – probably for farming?) and then recreated. Here’s the adjacent – rather large – amount of farmland – part of the farmland which covers much of the Galil region of Israel:

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Animals at the Hula Nature Reserve

Someone thought it would be a good idea to import Coypu in the 1950s – these beaver-looking things – from South America for their fur. Turns out the climate is too warm to get good fur here and now they’re just an invasive species:

The internet ‘promised’ us thousands and thousands of migratory birds squawking as loud as thousands and thousands of migratory birds squawking at the same time. Come at sunrise or near sunset for the best of it – we chose ‘near sunset’ for self-explanatory reasons and saw few V-shaped flocks of birds. There’s a hotel on site (which I only figured out when we arrived – now you can know ahead of time) and next time I’d consider staying there to wake up early to see the birds and then go back to sleep.

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What does it cost

It’s not cheap. For four people it came out to $70 for entrance and golf cart rental. You need not rent a golf cart. Instead you can walk, rent a bike, or rent a Flintstone-powered car as the peddles were too short for me and too far away for the kids. This guy seemed to just get out and push:

You do get a fancy visitor’s center where you can spend more money, like get a virtual reality simulation of nature should you choose to . . . why? Why oh why would you have that here?

The location does not suffer from a lack of parking. That is impressive.

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Other Observations

Other than observing birds and LCD screens affixed inches from your eyes to observe birds, I can’t figure out police cars here. In a 37 mile/hour construction zone, I’m being tailed by a police car at 60 miles/hour, the speed of the road. Few places even have speed limit signs, there are no billboards, and the views up north are just stunning. I’ve taken a liking to driving back through Samaria (the “West Bank”) rather than down the super-fast highway 6 where the “suggested speed limit” is 75 miles/hour though I only know this because Waze tells me.

There aren’t many places to eat along the way and many aren’t kosher or are “kosher except we don’t have certification because we’re open on Shabbat”. Gas station convenience stores were our primary source of travel food where you can find yogurt and pre-packaged kosher sandwiches. They’re pretty good:

Fibonacci and Malls

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Something that struck me during krias Shema this morning – malls are different here and I couldn’t quite place what it is. Malls here don’t have anchor stores. They’re more homogeneous in size here and there are no ‘department stores’ with everything (that I have found).

Converting kilometers to miles – the Fibonacci sequence does this roughly. 1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … the adjacent numbers are miles (the lower number) and kilometers (the higher number). Try it. The amount of error as you get higher increases though you can divide by 10 or 100 first, e.g. 500 kilometers about 300 miles.

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More about staying in Tzvat after the Hula Valley

Should you want plentiful kosher food, plentiful minyanim, and plenty of character, it’s the place to go. Driving there from the North takes you through the forest on winding, narrow, lightless glorified paths called roads. Amuka is in this area – where you pray for a shidduch [marriage partner]. I once did so for a kohein who doesn’t go near gravesites and messed up his father’s Hebrew name. He got a shidduch soon after anyway.

Honorable mention to Mordy:

Mordy ran a successful restaurant in Denver and one day he and his wife decided to drop everything and move to Tzvat about a year and half ago, the same timeframe as myself. His wings were excellent, excellent. American food in Israel, only better. So good.

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