Finding fun in the holy land of boredom

 It's a real problem with decision making in the world as we know it: you never know how the alternative would have looked. By definition, you don't get to experience what economists boringly call "the counterfactual."

So it is that I find myself in the rainy North in a very odd hikers' motel, in an equally extremely odd religiosity-on-sea, a run down and mostly empty seaside town where Jesus made the trip from up the road in Nazareth to preach, walk on water and generally piss people off.

His famous water-into-wine trick must have gone down a storm here, because the place is almost entirely without nightlife. There are two giant hotels which cater to religious Jewish families whose business here is a mystery to me, and they are both all-inclusive so the masses are fed with loaves and fishes without gracing the local bars, of which there is exactly one. So the small lakeside town of Tiberias sits mostly empty and glum after sundown while the hulking hotels glow cosily. (As a side note, the Hebrew name Tiveria is much prettier and sounds much less like a disease somehow.)

I ended up here after some cross-country mucking about after my guest from London left. Having left the airport late, I stayed one night on my own in an extremely weird guest house above a dismal shop in a very poor Arab village which had me scurrying for the hire car first thing in the morning. Having a dorm room, and indeed a whole guest house, to yourself is a lot less glamorous and a lot more creepy than you might imagine.

So first thing, I headed to Haifa aiming to spend the weekend there before returning the hire car. I reminded myself to trust in the phenomenon whereby something to do will always turn up if you walk around enough and make yourself available to enough chitchat. And so it proved to be. I was very unsure about what to do with my last two weeks of my time in Israel and I paced the now-familiar streets of Haifa listening in to people's conversations and wondering about getting a job in a coffee shop or something. I even spent $50 to join Workaway, the volunteering site I used when I was in Spain all those years ago (see blog posts of old.) Nothing came of this meandering, and I was feeling a bit heavy hearted and directionless, but when I got back to the hostel I sat down with my guitar and immediately got talking to someone who turned out to be volunteering there and who spoke highly of the experience.

She introduced me to the owner who was a kind and vaguely hippyish guy who said that what they really needed was someone good at DIY to help renovate their sister hostel in Tiberias, a small town on the shores of Lake Galilee, site of much holy mucking about in biblical times. He freely admitted that the once respectable seaside town had gone downhill, but argued persuasively that all the best connections he'd seen people make over the years had been there rather than somewhere more fun, precisely because there was nothing else to do.

So I decided to act while I still had the hire car and I drove that very night through foggy uplands from Haifa to Tiveria and back, around 70 minutes each way, dropping off my giant suitcase and dust-gathering laptop so I could make the bus trip the following morning unencumbered. All was well although the hostel in Tiveria was as weird and Bates-Motel-ish a place as you could imagine. There was no one there except a very stoned middle-aged night watchman guy who seemed thoroughly confused to see me and who let me into the luggage room then quickly returned back to his room to continue his nocturnal activities.

On my return to Haifa I saw I'd had a message on Workaway from an eco-village hippy desert paradise place at the opposite end of the country, in the desert South. I just had to go and check it out. So I paid £100 to extend my car hire for two days, spent the night in Haifa then set out after breakfast on the 4 hour journey south to Mitzpe Ramon. The drive went on forever and when I arrived I somehow immediately knew I didn't want to stay. The place was basically a hotel, run by a couple and assisted by two young Israeli lads. It was very beautiful and the people were friendly but somehow the weird sinister motel was calling me. I actually really don't understand why.

So I left after a cup of sweet tea and half and hour of sitting around awkwardly, and did what turned into a five hour drive back to Tiveria, including getting lost in the centre of Ber Sheva and a torrential thunderstorm outside Tel Aviv which slowed traffic to a crawl for about 80 kilometres.

So I'm here, for reasons I don't really understand, and having left behind an unexperienced "counterfactual" in the desert. There is well and truly nothing to do. I spent the day painting one of the rooms which, with the radio blasting, was kind of fun. Then me and one of the other volunteers, a Russian man with a seemingly unending appetite for hard work, went swimming in the lake. A definite highlight in this town. Determined to have a good time this evening I went out to look at the hotel bar of one of the swanky hotels but it was totally empty so I went instead to the one real pub in town, the Big Ben, and sat and nursed a beer for an hour. On the plus side, I picked up a newspaper from the bar and, with the help of two very sweet but very grumpy bar girls, who spoke not a word of English, attempted the crossword of which I miraculously solved two clues. I then wandered home and spotted a dingy first floor snooker hall where I went to watch a camp young Arab man roundly defeat an elderly Hebrew-speaking Chinese man at snooker.

I can honestly say this is not something I've ever done before.

Le Crossword de Triomphe

Tourism revisited

I'm back in the land of the lounging, lazing on my bed in our swanky hotel trying to come down from the crazy high of the World Cup final and the first night of Channukah coinciding. Needless to say I'm exhausted from doughnuts and penalties.

The last couple of days in the farm were both spent as a waiter in the restaurant but they weren't without incident.

I was due to leave on Friday to get to civilisation in time to collect A from the airport the following night (once Shabbat begins you can basically forget it until Saturday night.) Dalia was upset at the idea of having to do a restaurant Saturday on her own without me but I couldn't see anther way out.

Until inspiration hit me. It was Friday morning around 10.30am. If I could get to a hire car place before the Shabbat curtain was drawn across the country I would be free to stay on Friday night, help Dalia in the restaurant on Saturday, then depart Saturday afternoon free from the constraints of holy relaxation. The car hire place in Nazareth, our nearest big city, closed at noon. The place in Haifa, significantly further but an actual metropolis, closed at 1pm. It was stretching it. It also meant I would miss most, if not all, of Friday's work. But I decided to take the gamble.

Amnon was not feeling well so I set off to one big city or another on foot, quickly breaking a sweat as I trudged up and down the long, rocky dirt road to Yodfat. A seemingly interminable amount of time passed with no one but a lost-looking cow to mark my progress. This was exactly the kind of futile effort that ended with me coming back to the farm after dark having missed the day's restauranteering and the closure of the car hire places. I began to lose hope.

But then a huge pickup passed and stopped and I jumped into the back, carefully avoiding lying on the instruments that were inexplicable loaded there. I held on tight and lay down and was jerked and jolted the 300m to the first junction where the truck and I parted ways. I quickly flagged down a swish-looking city car that took me down the mountain to the highway which leads to Nazareth and Haifa. It was already 11.20. Thoughts of getting to Nazareth on time began to seem absurd so I decided to concentrate on Haifa.

Miraculously the second car who stopped was going all the way and I gladly got off the hot highway roadside and into the car. The young driver was on his way to a rock climbing competition, having just aced a try-out for the army to become a parachute instructor. Little wonder the Israelis you meet when you're traveling all seem so incredibly hard and cool.

I made it in easy time to hire the car, get back to help Dalia with both Friday and Saturday service and left after an exhausting two shifts to meet A at the airport in Tel Aviv and whisk him to our luxury spa experience hotel from whose pampered luxury I'm writing this now.

More physically exhausted and smelling of goats I have never been than I was last night, but as I swam in the clear warm water of the sea off Netanya, and ate room service pizza in my complimentary robe, it all seemed a thousand years ago already.

An exhausted me after finishing farm work for the last time

City Rob takes over (although note that the sandals haven't changed)

Take me to civilisation

 Last night was the last night.

The rain finally came yesterday and it rained steadily all day. In the evening, we found ourselves huddled in the farm kitchen while the electricity variously went on and off. The one tiny tea light we had wasn't really enough to light our evening meal so we were glad when the lights popped back on.
In the scarcely converted barn that's been my room here, I discovered that the roof isn't totally waterproof. Perhaps no surprise when you consider that it hasn't rained seriously here for maybe 10 months. The buckets I use to feed the animals came into my service in a whole new way.
With the rain also came the first insects I've really seen here. My room is full of flies this morning, and there were two fat luscious millipedes worming their way along the wall in the room I brush my teeth in.

But last night was also the last night for Daphne, our resident Greek language expert and my partner in evenings of speaking English and playing the guitar. She's off to other parts of the country for activities too exotic for me to even get my head around (a week-long festival of a special type of contemporary dancing) and I'm leaving myself tomorrow to receive visitors from England. So we celebrated by getting into Daphne's car and driving to Yodfat, the nearest community, where we were surprised to discover a that not only was the cafe/bar/restaurant open but people were in there dining and drinking as if heating, lighting, normal height tables and debit card machines were the most normal things in the world.

We had two beers, tried to work out the paths of our lives as the farm-themed part of the adventure ends, then we drove a little way up the mountain to sing the songs we've been practising for one last time.
She's considering giving up her flat in Tel Aviv for a return to the Greek island of her childhood, where they bring the water in on ships, and I'm considering how to make a return to London and full-time work not feel like this whole crazy adventure never happened.

Snap!

Snap! And just like that I'm back in the 21st Century. Sleek clean cars, road signs and kerbside litter.

Amnon and Dalia have just dropped me off at Yodfat Junction, less than 10 minutes' drive from the farm and I'm on my way to my first weekend since I arrived nine days ago.

I've got two nights and three days of freedom before I return, by which time the crucial date at which some other volunteers arrive will have drawn nearer. A German girl is spoken of. Daphne might even grace us once again.

Since I've bought nothing but a single pack of AA batteries in nine days, I reckon I've got the budget to splash out on an actual hotel once I get to Haifa. My trunks are optimistically in my bag. But for now, all the budget in the world can't save me from a 27 minute wait at the cold roadside waiting for the 265 which will take me to comfortable cosseted glory.

A corner is turned with Dalia

Today for the first time Dalia, uncompromising and severe owner of the goat farm and associated restaurant, smiled at me properly. An actual human connection was formed.

***

It's been a day of unlocking and possible corner-turning in my Israeli agricultural labourer's life. The catalyst for this has come from a most unlikely source. An actual agricultural labourer, rather than a tourist temporarily posing as one, has arrived from the North of Thailand, near Cheng Mai.

There seems to be some kind of agreement between the governments of Israel and Thailand that labourers can come here for five years and send money home to their families. It's the same story as we have in Britain: apparently there are some jobs that Israelis just no longer want to do. (Having done seven days of such a job, I think I can say "fair enough".)

Our Thai labourer arrived lost and alone and utterly confused, speaking not a word of English, never mind Hebrew. (This actually turns out to not quite be true: he knows about a dozen words, and seems to know most of the numbers up to ten.) To make matters worse his brand new Israeli SIM card, purchased very wisely by him at the airport (I don't know how this transaction took place), will give him calls and texts but no internet which means no Google Translate and god knows what he will find to do in his room in the evenings with no books, no music and no internet.

But the arrival of this 26-year-old has instantly transformed my existence. It was clear from the first morning, when I showed him the routine, that he was already much better than me at wielding a pitch fork, pushing a wheelbarrow and filling giant sacks with hay. In an idle moment, we chatted via typing into Google Translate, and it turned out that his previous job had been working with goats and horses in a Thai military camp. (Both Amnon and Dalia, when I told them this, separately asked the very good question I hadn't thought to ask: why does the army need goats? I asked him later and he didn't know.)

Now I'm no expert on the Thai army, but I would guess that they run a tight ship and that there's not much lazing around or skiving from the workers. It's a pretty safe bet that what I'd found to be back-breaking toil will appear to him to be the most comedically easy job of his adult life. He's a fast learner, a quick and attentive worker and basically he already kicks my ass in all the things I've been doing since I got here. Excellent news.

***

This, and the departure of Daphne, the Greek goddess of the Hebrew language, means that I have now been put into the role of the female volunteer and am helping out in the restaurant. This is extremely welcome news to me, and meant that today Dalia and I have been in cahoots. At around 11am, a never-before-heard-of coffee break took place in the kitchen while the labourers continued their toil. During this break, I spoke to Dalia properly for the first time as a fellow human, not as someone who is doling out the next task, or assessing the quality of the previous one.

I asked why she's not making more of an effort to get more volunteers, and she described to me how exhausting it's been, over the last 30 years, to constantly have to tell a never-ending stream of newbies how to do the same small number of tasks and to watch them get in wrong in every imaginable fashion.
She told me of a volunteer who, having been told to weed a vegetable patch, dug up every plant in the garden, apparently including a sage plant that had been established for decades. She told me of flooded pathways, spilt milk, garden tools in the cutlery drawer and every manner of mistake that, to someone who knows how things should look, seem like the most idiotic things in the world but to someone who has no idea of what good or bad are supposed to look like, might seem completely understandable.

So she's tired. Tired of explaining every last tiny detail of every last job, for fear that a misunderstanding or a misalignment of vision might lead to some new catastrophe. She needs an assistant; someone to look after the volunteers and make sure they're not making things worse.

She's also set the bar very high in hospitality terms because she makes two or three excellent meals a day from scratch for the volunteers so if the numbers swell this becomes a serious undertaking (and doesn't actually bring in any more money because more volunteers just means that the existing volunteers work less.)
So I can totally understand her manner. Her tone of utter exhaustion when a tool you've never seen before ends up in the wrong one of six rusty containers full of things you don't recognise. She's had enough.

I described to her how she comes across and she said "it's not you, it's everyone for thirty years."

It's impossible to argue with that.

Just one of the incredible and delicious meals Dalia has been serving up to her volunteers day in and day out for 30 years. This was breakfast a few days ago. Wow.

The Farm

 It appears that the coast is clear for at least the next few minutes so I'll take the opportunity to write a bit about life here on the farm.
Life here as a volunteer has changed a lot over the last few years. It sounds like things used to be pretty jolly here. Amnon would play football with the kids and the volunteers, and the tips from the restaurant used to go towards a weekly night in the local pub (run by Amnon and Dalia's son and his wife) and there was even a weekly trip to the hammam in town. There still is a room for the boys and a room for the girls but, for the moment at least, it's just me in the boys' room and just Daphne, the Greek girl with the exceptional Hebrew, in the girls'.
Perhaps because of Covid or maybe because of Amnon's age and recent ill health, life for Daphne and me feels much more like working on a farm, and much less like an international volunteering vibe. There's a lot to do just to keep things ticking over and, inevitably for a farm built very much by hand over the years, there are things which need fixing every day which means that the basic daily tasks are just a background rhythm against which the remaining work takes place. Dalia is a wizard in the kitchen, creating two delicious and satisfying meals a day from seemingly very few ingredients, but Amnon can't help out and the son-in-law Yakov has taken another job in town as a history teacher so he's out on most days.
This means there's a lot of work but actually, despite the moany nature of the opening to this post, it's kind of fun to be working so hard and so physically for so many of the daylight hours. Now I mention it, it might also be the season that means the working day is so intense. It starts to get dark at around a quarter past four here, so there are fewer hours in which to do everything than there would be in the summer.
The day starts at half six with my first round of feeding the animals. I have to give grain, water and corn to the cows; grain and hay to the sheep; grain, straw and water to the horses; food nuggets to the dogs; and take grain and straw in a wheelbarrow down to "the hospital", a field further down the hill where a few of the apparently sick goats and sheep are kept. When I first started this routine, wheeling the wheelbarrow back up the hill from the hospital was the hardest part of the whole routine, but its amazing how things like that quickly become easier as your body gets used to physical labour. I'm also 10 per cent less terrified of going into the horses' enclosure than I was when I started all those eons ago (it's actually only day five.)

***

A second round of feeding starts around half three in the afternoon after lunch, which is almost always attended by an ever-changing cast of guests, many of whom are actually here as contractors to do one job or another but who are universally invited to join us at Dalia's table.
This means that I'm hearing an enormous amount of Hebrew which is exactly as I expected: a great way to learn and a weird and isolating way to socialise. Although at yesterday's lunch I asked my first ever question of a guest although I've already been comedically wide of the mark as to what's actually going on as to raise a chorus of laughter. (Today at breakfast, the daughter-in-law who works in the bar was talking about some rude French women who were dismissive and asked too many question. "Wait," I interjected, "was this in the bar?" It turns out that the story was about her visit to the French embassy in Tel Aviv, not about a group of French women coming to an extremely rural local bar. Ah well.)
Each meal starts with a few moments of silent prayer, which is introduced by Amnon falling silent and everyone else following suit. It's broken by him starting to serve himself food and maybe saying a blessing on the bread. Needless to say that it took me a long time to realise that this is what was going on when I first encountered it. I thought it was an uncomfortable silence and, as is my duty as an English person, I broke it with some merry chit-chat. Maybe they need a laminated information card for new volunteers! This would be high on the list.

***

On top of the two feeding rounds, I have variously: manhandled animals around the farm, swept leaves from the road that runs from one end to the other (a truly Sisyphean job which seems to end up with things looking more-or-less as they started), carried huge sacks of grain, moved wheelbarrows of big stones, been a waiter in the restaurant, fixed a fence in a far-distant part of the farm, hitched a trailer, built a stone barrier to prevent goat break-outs, cut barbed wire to length and torn fence posts out of the ground with my bare hands.

But there's sweetness here too: the trees are absolutely bursting with fruit so we get amazing oranges, tangerines, star fruit and persimmon, and Daphne likes to sing so we've had some nice evenings of playing songs on the guitar once the evening meal is finished.

Needless to say I'm filthy from dawn until dusk but, as I've noticed before in these periods of physical labour, there's a sense of well-being that is absolutely unique to sitting down after a long day's hard filthy work. So maybe it's kind of worth it. At least for a week or so until I've finally had enough.

A trip into the strange and wild country

This blog post is already a few days old, but life on the farm is so busy that I haven't had time to post it until now. Another post about life here will come soon.

 ***

The cow that comes down in the night is huffing and blowing and making a kind of snorting sound. There's a rough sort of baa coming from the goat shed and some distant tinkling bells make it sound like maybe there are reindeer somewhere hereabouts. These are the signs that I most certainly am not in Tel Aviv any more.
I had my last Abulafia's beef shawarma last night, and this morning bid a fond goodbye to the Abraham Hostel breakfast, always a sociable affair. After buying some last-minute panic items for the great unknown that awaited me, I checked out for one last time and made my way to the train station.
Over the last few days since H left I've made the journey twice to the middle of nowhere in the hills around Nazareth to visit a couple of volunteering opportunities. The first was a beautfiul olive oil pressing workshop surrounded by gardens with donkeys and chickens wandering around. The presses were working when I arrived so it was a very noisy and busy environment. They said I could come but that I'd be the only volunteer, since they usually have most people around for the picking, which is earlier in the year, and the pruning which is later. The hunt continued.
The following day, I came back to the area to visit the goat farm. It was a very confusing arrival because the goat farm is also a rustic restaurant and I arrived at the same time as two posh Israelis who had come for dinner. I didn't realise this and assumed they were also volunteers, and asked lots of questions which bemused them while their answers bemused me equally. "Are you friends with Dalia?" I asked, she being the person I'd been communicating with about volunteering. "Sort of," they replied before striding off towards the farm building. "Wait, let me get my phone," I cried, assuming we'd all arrive together for a happy volunteers meeting. They hesitated for a few moments, before looking at each other then proceeding on their way, as I hurried to rejoin them. They arrived and were immediately ushered to a table and brought drinks, which I was pointedly not invited to join them at. The penny finally dropped once they disappeared into a private ante-room and I was left to sit at the communal table in the kitchen with the cast of characters who had coalesced around these guests' arrival.
These were Dalia herself, a woman of maybe around 60 with huge and tumbling hair and rustic hippy attire; a possibly older man who didn't introduce himself who was similarly dressed like someone who has lived in Tibet, possibly in a yurt; and Daphne, a woman in her thirties who turned out not in fact to be Israeli as her amazing Hebrew suggested, but Greek. Dalia busied herself with finalising dishes which Daphne took through to the secret back room and the man, who I know now to be Dalia's husband and co-founder of the farm Amnon, poured himself coffee and generally seemed to get somewhat in the way.
I was left standing around, trying to convince myself that I wasn't doing so awkwardly (this is actually possible if you concentrate on it: you can just be standing around, rather than standing around awkwardly), or feebly helping out. Dalia asked me in Hebrew to stir the tahina and I roundly misunderstood and put it on the table. I felt like this was a foretaste of the many such interactions that were surely to come.
After a brief meal which included the opening of an ice cream tub which turned out to be full of outstandingly delicious goats cheese (inevitably) I got back on the road because I'd hired my car by the hour, not by the day and it had to be back in Haifa in less than an hour.
The fact that I'd turned up to see the place, and stayed for lunch seemed to be confirmation enough of my credentials to come and volunteer, so it was generally agreed that I would come back the following day.

***

My arrival at the farm today happened in some of the most bizarre circumstances imaginable. So much so that it already feels like a weird dream as I sit here in not-very-glorified barn in the dark writing this on my first night as an Israeli farm hand.
I caught the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and then two buses into increasingly wild-feeling countryside, both of which were full of young soldiers going home for the weekend. I had my giant wheelie suitcase with me again, which felt especially out of place as I waited in the increasingly low evening sun at a bus stop by the side of a highway in what otherwise seemed like featureless scrub land.

I eventually arrived at the final point of civilisation on the way to the farm, where I'd been told to phone for a lift the rest of the way along the dirt track. At this point I realised that I was in a signal black spot that continued for at least a few hundred meters in both directions, so I decided to walk. Wheeling my giant suitcase down a steep unpaved road felt extra incongruous, but I was somewhat encouraged by the fact that vehicles seemed to be coming the opposite way. As I reached a levelling off of the slope I realised that the vehicles were in fact coming from the scene of some sort of accident. A leisure buggy of some kind had clearly come off the road at some speed and police and ambulances were there with flashing lights. Still without signal I stood dumbly by as people came and went from the scene of the accident and a woman arrived in a smart car and immediately started remonstrating angrily and tearfully in Arabic with a man at the scene. I clutched my giant suitcase close to me, and waited for a lull in the proceedings in which to ask someone for a lift to the still-distant end of the increasingly unpassable dirt track.

Finally a man in a beaten-up SUV turned onto the track, and went slowly enough that with whistles and shouts I was able to flag him down. He knew almost no English and only Arabic, but knew enough to respond excitedly when I said I was English. "England is a great country" he cried with glee, and we were on our way, my luggage and guitar bouncing around in the back.

We arrived and everyone was immediately ushered in for a meal at the Japanese-level sit-on-the-floor low dining table. The Arabic speaking man turned out to be an associate of Amnon, the man of the house, and the two man spoke animatedly in a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic throughout the meal while Dalia, the chef, homemaker and wife of Amnon, and Daphne, the Greek volunteer with the excellent Hebrew, listened quietly. I sat in total bemusement and ate my salad and tahina, chewing quietly like someone eating Monster Munch at a wake.