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