Tel Aviv Rooftop

A big, airless balloon lying on a field near Kibbutz Ruhama In honour of our "120th birthday" kind and generous friends bought us a special present - a trip in a hot air balloon, including an overnight stay in a 'tzimmer' (guest house), a champagne breakfast and a massage. This weekend we finally got round to using the voucher. Since what our friends had bought us was what's called chavila (parcel of services), this first involved coordinating with every contact person  in the chain: Hadar for the balloon trip, Gil for the tzimmer, Guy (who turned out to be a lady) for the evening meal, and Hanita for the massage. To cut a long story short, yesterday we took the massage (deeply satisfying), ate Hanita's supper and drank wine (excellent), stayed at Gil's tzimmmer (delightful in its stylish simplicity) and at 5.45 this morning were racing along the deserted, misty roads of the northern Negev towards Kibbutz Ruchama. The "ground crew" there had a...

Parking says the sign at the Cornfehl (?) Farm. Not seen in the frame is funky little restaurant featuring goat cheese with an outdoor deck overlooking a flower garden and an orchard. Israel's real Wild West is of course the West Bank but the Negev comes in an honorable second place. The sun dries and cracks and blanches. The winds whip over the mountains and through the wadis and the flash floods carve out new terrain. A politically aware post about a trip to the Negev should mention the miserable “unrecognized Bedouin villages” to the south and east of Beersheba, the large army firing zones off limits to civilians and what seemed like an inordinate number of prisons. But we were on a weekend getaway and were interested in getting closer to some of the local inhabitants. Yeruham, perched on the edge of hamchtesh hagadol the Great Crater (diminished to only “Large” on the road sign) is home to a few factories (Negev Ceramica, the Phoenicia Glass Works) and a few thousand pe...