Adventures on the Mount of Olives

Last week I promised a description of our Saturday adventures on the Mount of Olives. And I will deliver, after a brief over view of the week. This week ended up being pretty similar thus far to last week: Gerrit spent most of the day at work, while I busied myself with getting the apartment civilized.

Beyond that, I spent a much-enjoyed half day walking around the Old City on Wednesday… it started as a simple mission to the tourist office to make enquiries regarding various museums and sites in anticipation of hosting Sonya next week (as I’ve already alluded to below). But you see, the tourist office is just inside the Old City walls, inside the Jaffa gate… and when I found out that I could go and visit the Dome of the Rock, I just couldn’t resist!! I decided to stick around until the proper time… and in the mean time wandered around the Christian Quarter. There, I ended up climbing to the top of the Tower of the Church of the Redeemer (a better work out than any Stair Master!) and was privy to some stunning view of the Old City (again, please refer to the last blog entry for some pictures of this outing). The Dome of the Rock was magnificent, and walking around the Temple Mount was an awe inspiring experience as well. It is in a sense a refuge for the Muslim community: I was there at 1pm, and a bunch of children had just gotten out of school… there were kids running around, boys playing soccer; young girls giggling and calling to other groups of giggling girls… there were old men sitting in the shade chatting with friends, or quietly dozing; a couple families were having a picnic lunch; in one pavilion, a group of women were studying the Koran… it felt so calm, so normal and yet somehow spiritual at the same time… these scenes of normal life within such a holy place just made sense there somehow, as it is as much a sunny, opened garden as it is a place of prayer… and it was in stark contrast to the crowded, dark, harassed alleys of the rest of the Old City. I will definitely be visiting there again.

The adventure on the Mount of Olives happened as follows: on Saturday afternoon, when our neighbourhood was virtually completely shut down for the Shabbat, we decided to go out for a drive, in order to further familiarize ourselves with Jerusalem, and also to test out the new GPS Gerrit had bought. One of the places I had read about that I wanted to visit was the Mount of Olives, and that’s what we attempted to type into the GPS. The GPS informed us it was unreachable… but proposed a route there anyway. So we set off, following its directions. Our side of the city was indeed deserted, and the roads were pretty empty. But the minute we rounded the north west corner of the Old City, suddenly, we were in a traffic jam! We were in 3 lanes of traffic filled with cars, vans and several large tour buses, all converging onto a small single-lane round about. The van behind us decided to let us and everyone else know that he felt the slow pace was unacceptable… and blared his horn repeatedly. Eventually we crawled our way into the round about only to find ourselves yielding to two guys trying to push a large cart of bread through the round about! Tour buses, impatient vans and now bread, all in one large traffic jam. As we ease our way out of the round about, we realized we had crossed into the arab or muslim side of town, which explained why we went from deserted streets to complete mayhem: the muslims celebrate their holy day on Friday, and so on the Shabbat, their side of town is back in business. Also, it was the reason the GPS initially told us the Mount of Olives was unreachable… as it was set to navigate through non-arab neighbourhoods only.

Anyway, we continued along… and things suddenly got interesting with respect to the GPS instructions. You see, a GPS is only as good as the latest maps it contains. Furthermore, we have 3 paper maps of Jerusalem, and we’ve noticed that not only is it difficult to extrapolate from the maps to reality, but the 3 maps are all slightly different from each other as well! So really, Jerusalem is rather a maze, and there seems to be no definitive map of it available! Likely this was also the problem our GPS was having… As we attempted to follow its instructions, it kept declaring “route recalculation” which basically means you’ve strayed from where it meant you to go and it is trying to correct course. Not only were we and our GPS lost, but very quickly we got ourselves deep into the Arab neighbourhood (aka East Jerusalem, whereas West Jerusalem is the Israeli side of town). This was our first time venturing here, and frankly it was rather intimidating. First of all, upon question our Israeli relocation representative about what there was to see in East Jerusalem, he basically said something to the effect of “why would you even want to go there” and basically concluded that we shouldn’t for our own safety. And second, whereas as West Jerusalem was basically a slightly more hectic version of modern Western civilization, East Jerusalem was much more reminiscent of my travels in East Africa, with narrow roads, a chaos of small business owners, garbage, stray animals and people everywhere. Up until this point, I had not really experience any culture shock (both due to the tamer nature of West Jerusalem, and also knowing what to expect), but if there was culture shock to be had, it was definitely here, in East Jerusalem.

At one point, the GPS kept trying to redirect us west, but we decided not to listen, as I have a fairly good sense of orientation and was very sure the Mount of Olives was in the other direction. Eventually we emerged from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood onto Mount Scopus, and found ourselves on the Hebrew University Campus. Suddenly, an amazing vista opened up below us. From inside the city of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus is a smallish hill overlooking the city… a little to the north of the Mount of Olives. But standing on top of it, it becomes clear that it really is a “mountain” as the other slope falls away rather steeply, descending down into an immense valley. In the distance, we could see a second ridge of mountains and in front of them, a large body of water appeared to be starting and continuing towards the south beyond our view. Gerrit and I parked the car and stood there over this amazing view, debating what it was we were looking at. I argued that the water was in fact the Dead Sea with the Jordan Rift Valley surrounding it and that the mountains beyond it were actually across the border in Jordan. Gerrit wasn’t convinced, he felt the Dead Sea was further away. So we pulled out the guide book, studied the map, made guesstimates of distances in the landscape in front of us and more or less concluded it couldn’t be anything but the Dead Sea!! How amazing, we had no idea you could see it, and even the mountains in Jordan, all the way from Jerusalem! It also made it more obvious why the hills surrounding Jerusalem like Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives actually deserved the designation "mount". I later looked into it, Jerusalem is about 800-850m above sea level, whereas the Dead Sea and rift valley are about 400m below sea level, such that from the valley below, we are some 1200m up. Staring in disbelief at the amazing view, can you imagine my consternation when I realized we had forgotten the camera at home?!?! And ironically, I’ve managed to return to Mount Scopus several times since that day, and never again has there been a view…. since the valley is often shrouded in either smog or under a cloudy front.

Amazing view or not, we still hadn’t reached our target of the Mount of Olives. So we hopped back in the car and continued south. Again we seemed to enter an Arab neighbourhood. Then we drove up to a large wall… which occluded where I thought the Mount of Olives should be. Then we noticed tour buses and tourists congregating around a small gate in the wall. We ventured in… and found ourselves in the Pater Noster cloister. This is a church and convent built around the small cave where Jesus is said to have taught the Our Father (or Pater Noster in Latin) to his disciples for the first time. The cloister walls have the Our Father written on them in countless languages…. We found both Slovak and Dutch… and many others. After walking around there, we knew we must be close, as my guide book was clear that the Pater Noster is ON the Mount of Olives…. But where was the amazing view of Jerusalem that it promised? Back in our car, we headed along the cloister wall and, after rounding the corner, suddenly found ourselves at destination: a lookout terrace just below the 7 Arches Hotel, overlooking the slopes of the Mount of Olives and the Old City below! It was incredible, a much better view than we’d seen before… again my heart cried at the thought of the forgotten camera at home. I have however returned several times since then, so I am including some pictures of this breath taking view in this blog.

On the lookout terrace, there is a Bedouin camel, for the benefit of the tourists… and several men were trying to sell us various panoramas and books about the Old City… When they finally gave up on us, as it became clear we weren’t buying anything, we just stood there, in awe of the view below us. In a little while, an old man in typical old fashion Arab dress came up the hill on a white donkey. He was in a very golly mood, and was very friendly… and for once didn’t seem interested in selling us anything. In broken English, he joked with us that the donkey was an descendant of the donkey that Jesus rode down the Mount of Olives and into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday centuries ago…. And he explained that this is why he had named him Peter (after Jesus’ trusted disciple). He also introduced us to his friend the camel and fed him green cabbage leaves from a large rucksack on Peter’s back. After a while, with some reluctance, we decided it was time to get home again (goodness knows how long it was going to take to find our way back), and besides, the wind was harsh and cold up on top of the Mount. I asked the old man whether there was a way to get down the Mount of Olives towards the Old City (vs the long way we had come). He pointed to the road he had come up on Peter and said "that way". I looked dubiously at the narrow cobble stone road and asked whether we could go down that way with a car. He enthusiastically assured me that yes. So we decide to give it a go. It started off just fine, it first led to a lower look-out terrace, and there was even another car there. But then is turned sharply down hill, and continued between two tall walls.

As we descended along this scary road, we started passing some of the other significant sites on the Mount of Olives: to our left, the vast Jewish cemetery (Jews believe that when Judgment day comes, the souls from this cemetery will be judged first, so that it is both very popular, and very expensive to be buried here); to our right, the Dominus Flevit Chapel and the Church of St Mary Magdalene (Russian Orthodox, in typical muscovite style with 5 gold gilded onion domes - see picture... the road is between the walls you can see in the foreground)…. The further we got, the narrower and steeper the road got. Soon, we were in a place where a car any bigger than our compact Hyundai would not have fit! The prospect of perhaps having to back our way up the hill should the road end or become impassible was quite horrifying. Luckily all ended well, as we suddenly exited onto a bigger road, right beside the Church of All Nations. Phew! Next time, I will likely not seek the advice regarding roads from someone whose mode of transportation was substantially narrower than ours…. After all, Peter was less than half the width of our car! From there, getting home ended up being quite easy… We took a road that followed the Old City walls up and over Mount Zion and eventually lead us all the way to Jaffa Gate. And from Jaffa Gate, we already knew our way home. What a mini adventure for an afternoon! It made me hungry for future opportunities to drive up there, and to actually visit some more of the sites and churches on the Mount of Olives.