Yam L' Yam!

It's been a long time since I've posted and I know I've been a little bit lazy this past month but this post is so amazing that it's going to make up for anything lacking in this past month.  This past weekend,  I completed the cross-country hike known as Yam L' Yam, literally translated as sea to sea. This is a 3 day hike of 75 km/46 miles from the west side of  Israel, the Mediterranean Sea, to the east side of Israel, the Sea of Galilee.  Hadassa, Raquel, Aliza, Eve, Shevi Adi, Belle, and I did this hike from Sunday to Tuesday.  This was one of the most physically challenging and mentally demanding things I have ever done.

Thursday night and Friday we spent packing for the trip.  We had huge bags in which we packed sleeping bags, some extra clothes, toiletries, three bottles of water and some other personal things. We also each had to leave room for food and other supplies that we had to take with us that everybody would use. The kitchen at school was really nice and they really helped us out by giving us a lot of food that we needed that they were getting rid of anyway because of Pesach.  We took fruits and vegetables, bread and spreads to go on it, a pot and a burner and quite a few other things.  I carried the onions and potatoes that would be for dinner, plastic bowls and plates, and a loaf of bread. Our bags weighed about 30 pounds! The first time we picked tried to pick up our bags, we had such a hard time getting them on our backs and then moving our feet but we eventually got the hang of it and eventually we didn't even think about it.  We all made sure our shoulder straps were well adjusted but it was still hard to carry.  I then figured out how to use the waist strap which takes a good percentage of the weight off your shoulder and back and transfers it to your hips.

Raquel and I spent Shabbat in Herzliya at my Israeli Chavruta's house.  She had a gorgeous house and they fed us so much food.  It was really great to have a nice relaxing Shabbat before our hike started.  They also helped us out quite a bit. They let us put our deli meat in their freezer until we left and they gave us goodie bags filled with candy.  It was a bit awkward when we asked them if we could use their nail clippers to cut our toenails but they let us do that too.

Day #1
We woke up the next morning at 5:00.  We got dressed and ate breakfast and called a cab to take us to the train station.  We got on a 6:15 train to Nahariya where we would be meeting the rest of the crew.  Our train arrived at 8:00 and we met everybody else including our guide Yotam and his friend Oz who was coming along with us for the day. We started our hike at 9:00 and we were supposed to go 24 km on the first day.  We started out following the green trail which goes along the Kziv River.  About 15 minutes into the hike we come to a river that we have to cross. Yotam and Oz hop across the river on some rocks.  Next, Aliza goes and as she was going she slipped a little bit and one of her shoes got soaking wet.  Next, I went and as I was stepping on the rocks to get across, I lost my balance just a little bit because I wasn't used to having an extra 30 lbs on my back, and I completely fell into the river.  I stood up soaking wet but unhurt because my huge bag broke my fall.  Everyone else, also not wanting to fall in, took off their shoes and socks and walked across in the water.  After they crossed, they looked up and saw another river just a few feet away.  They hopped along bare foot and walked through the next river.  We spent a few minutes after that drying off and then continued walking.  A few minutes later we came to another river.  At this point, nobody really cares and we all just walked through the river with our shoes and socks on.  About an hour into the hike, we stopped for a water break.  As we were standing around cooling off, I noticed that there was a massive bee with a huge stinger on the end on my shirt.  I freaked out for a few seconds and then I realized that it might sting me so I stopped moving.  Yotam ran over and tried to get it off with a stick but it kept crawling up my shirt and then went into my shirt.  I almost took my shirt off but then the bee flew away.  We continued walking and then we came to another river that everyone just walked through.  Aliza was the last one and as we're all walking away we heard a huge splash.  Aliza was the next one to fall in the water.  She wasn't as lucky as I was and she got a huge bruise on her thigh.  Through out the day we took so many bathroom breaks because we were drinking so much water.  I think I went to the bathroom at least six times that first day.  At one of our bathroom stops, Raquel pulls out the lemons that she was carrying and we all put some in our hair to see if we would get highlights from the sun.  It didn't really work out too well.

We stopped for lunch at around 12:30 by a really pretty spot along the river.  We took one of the tuna cans someone was carrying and smoked the tuna by putting a piece of paper towel on top of it and lighting it on fire.  Unfortunately, we only brought one small container of chocolate spread which wasn't really enough and we brought two huge jars of peanut butter which we wouldn't even come close to finishing.  Oz had a tiny little burner where he made tea with some nana leaves that he picked from the side of the road. We started walking again after about an hour break.  We walked through such a beautiful part of Israel.  Every few minutes somebody else would say, "Wow, this is so beautiful!" We eventually got to this big open space where lots of Bnei Akiva kids were sitting eating their lunch.  There was a deep river with rushing water there  so we tried to cross on the rocks.  Shevi and Hadassa made it across the river first.  The rest of us were having trouble so Shevi came back to try to help us.  On her way back to help us, she slipped and fell in the water.  3 down 5 to go! As Shevi was getting up, we all look to our right because Eve tried to go a different way and she slipped and fell.  4 down 4 to go! She tried getting up and fell back down again and because the current was so strong, she kind of got carried along for a couple of feet.  All of the Bnei Akiva kids were kinda just staring at us as we basically swam through this river with our huge backpacks on our backs. We continued walking until we got to a road.  This was the hardest part of the day because we have to walk uphill for about 15 minutes.  This might not sound like a lot but with 30 lbs on your back it felt like we were walking for an hour and a half and when we finished muscles in our leg that we didn't even know existed hurt like crazy!  After the huge hill we sat under a tree for quite a while resting.  Up on a hill nearby, Yotam and Oz found a shopping cart that they brought down to us.  Half of us put our bags in the shopping cart and we pushed it down the road.  We eventually got to a gas station where we were able to go to the bathroom in a toilet for the first time since the morning.  We refilled our water bottles and went on to our campsite.

We camped in a random forest off the side of the road.  We wanted to make a bonfire and set up the burner.  We put all our stuff down and we began to collect firewood.  Hadassa and Adi went to go set up the burner.  As we were picking up branches off the floor, we hear a scream.  I turned around and I saw the burner blow up.  The whole thing was on fire and Yotam came running over to save the day again.  He quickly put out the fire and thankfully Hadassa and Adi were okay.  We continued collecting firewood as Hadassa and Adi recovered.  I was searching for bigger pieces instead of just little branches and I saw a small dead tree a little bit taller than me.  I basically just pulled an entire tree out of the ground.  We had to break it up into smaller pieces to put on the bonfire.  We put onions and potatoes in the fire and we made noodles on Oz's little burner.  We also had the deli meat that by this time had defrosted.  We also bought marshmallows that we roasted on sticks. We sat around the bonfire for quite a while, massaging each other's backs and playing games and suddenly we feel drops of rain. We quickly run to get our stuff and run under a bunch of trees.  Thankfully it stopped raining after a few minutes and we all just went to sleep.  It was pretty cold outside and we were sleeping on the floor of a forest so we all didn't get such a good night's sleep.

Day #2
We woke up at 6:45, ate breakfast, packed our stuff up, and got ready to go.  Oz was leaving us and we were all sad to go because he was such a cool guy.  With Yotam in the lead, we began hiking.  Day 2 is the hardest day because we had to go 26 km and it was the day with the roughest terrain.  Today we were going to climb and then descend Mount Meron, the second highest mountain in Israel.  We started the day off with another one of those steep uphills.  We didn't stop until we got to the top of this section when we were all panting and wondering how we were going to get through the rest of the day.  We walked mostly uphill for hours.  This was the hardest part of the whole trip.  Not only did it take a tremendous amount of physical power, it also took so much mental effort to make yourself keep going.  Towards the end of the morning, Belle started complaining that her feet were hurting.  Now, we had an amazing group of girls who didn't really complain and always supported each other if one was hurt.  Belle wouldn't complain unless she was in a huge amount of pain so we knew it was bad.  Belle had these really interesting spider shoes that had amazing grips on the bottom for mountain climbing but they had absolutely no support so she was able to feel every single rock that she stepped on.

We stopped for lunch at a picnic ground and we all took off our shoes.  Belle took off her shoes and her feet were covered in blisters.  We ate the same lunch that we had the day before and then we all rested.  Raquel and Shevi also had a lot of blisters so they decided to pop them.  They sterilized safety pins with fire and then began to pop their blisters.  I was sitting next to Belle as she silently cried while popping her blisters.  Thankfully, Yotam had an extra pair of sandals that he said Belle could wear.  Right after lunch we were about to climb the last bit of Mount Meron.  We all put our shoes back on and our bags back on and got ready to do the climb.  As we were walking up the mountain we saw another huge group of kids coming down the mountain.  It was really annoying having to pass by all of them because they were standing in the middle of the road but it was a great distraction.  At one point they were blocking the entire path so we kinda had to walk on the sideways part of the road and as I'm about to pass someone, I slipped and fell.  I was totally fine and got right back up again.  We hiked up this mountain for almost an hour straight without a break until we made it to the top.  It was a beautiful view at the top and you were able to see Mount Hermon with it's snow- capped summits in the distance.  We began our descent and we knew that as soon as we got to the bottom we would reach our campsite.  It took a few hours and we were all super exhausted but we finally made it to the campgrounds.

Our campsite was at the very top of a steep hill so for the last time that day we basically ran for five minutes up the hill to our camp site and we all just dropped our stuff and sat down because we were too exhausted to do anything else.  We weren't allowed to make a fire on the camp grounds so we just used the burner to make soup with noodles and rice.  Yotam's friends Noam, Miriam and Tamar joined us for the night and the next day.  We all attempted to get some sleep but it was even colder than the night before.  I don't get cold too easily and I was shivering under all of my layers of clothing.  Our campgrounds were on the edge of the graves of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son.  In the middle of the night Belle and Shevi were so cold that they decided to go inside the building where their memorials were and sleep there.  They woke up at 6:30 in the morning surrounded by women praying.  As quietly as possible, they picked up their sleeping bags and walked out back to the campsite.

Day #3
I woke up not too long after than, changed my shirt for the first time and ate breakfast.  Miriam and Tamar bought us some candy and chocolate milk which made us all so happy.  They also drove here so they offered to take anything that we didn't need in their car with them.  We were so happy because this made our bags at least ten pounds lighter, plus we had eaten most of the food that we brought with us.  This was thankfully the easiest day.  We were going 24 km and our bags felt super light after we had been carrying 30 lbs. for the past two days.  The first part of the day was walking basically on the side of a mountain following the Amud River.  Once again we met up with hundreds of scouts that were walking along the same trail as us.  The sentence of the day was," Excuse me, can we pass?" I must've said this sentence in Hebrew a hundred times. Our group got split up as we did a couple of times before but it was always fine because the path was clearly marked.  Belle and I were walking with Noam and we thought that we were the last ones.  We were walking really fast, about 4 km/hr to catch up with everyone.  We spotted them off the road sitting in a cluster of trees, the only shade around.  We were happy to find out that we weren't the last ones and we got to rest while waiting for the others.  We were in our cluster of trees and we looked to our left and we saw a cow and it's calf staring at us from less than five feet away.  They weren't doing anything except standing there.  We felt like we were the ones in a cage in the zoo and they were looking at us from the outside.  The rest of our group finally arrived.  They told us that they had taken a wrong turn and they had to walk on a very dangerous and narrow cliff edge to get back on the path.

We ate lunch there in our little cluster of trees with the cow watching us.  We had the same lunch that we had the past two days but we didn't really care because we were just hungry.  We wanted to get moving quickly so we could finish before sunset.  Just as we started up again, we saw a small group of boys from one of the other yeshivas in Israel who were also hiking yam l' yam.  They told us that they didn't think they could make it before sunset and we basically said that they were crazy and we were going to do it.  They asked if they could join our group because they didn't really have a guide and were just following a map that they had.  There was four of them and they told us that three of their friends had dropped out.  They were also really impressed that none of us dropped out.  The last bit of walking was hard terrain but we didn't care anymore.  We walked for about an hour on a very narrow path with prickly thorns on both sides.  Then we walked on a path that crossed back and forth between walking on a normal path and walking on huge boulders.  The last hour was great because we had the adrenaline rush to finish and it was basically flat land.  The four yeshiva boys left us to go their own way at the end.  The last 15 minutes we were able to see the Sea of Galilee and we knew that we were really close.  When we finally got there, we dropped our bags and touched the water to say that we made it.

We took a cab to the nearby city Tiberius where we caught a bus back to Jerusalem.  We all slept on the bus and when we got off we could barely move.  Adi was the worst.  She could only take the tiniest steps and it took us a half hour to walk what we would walk in ten minutes.  When we got back to our dorms we were all so happy, but anybody in the dorms wasn't.  We smelled so bad.  We put our bags down in the hallway and you couldn't even go out of your room because it smelled so bad.  We all took nice long showers because we did shower in three days.  Then at one in the morning we had a blister popping party.  It sounds gross and it was pretty gross.  We sterilized some needles with alcohol and then began to pop our blisters.  I won't go into much detail because it was quite disgusting and painful too.

We all woke up the next day quite achy but alive and well.  We were all so happy that we accomplished this crazy hike.  We were so happy and thankful to be with the people we were with and to have had Yotam as our amazing guide.  Yam L' Yam was an amazing experience even though it was actually crazy and painful at times but we pulled through, helped each other and we were all so happy we did it.  Comment and tell me what you think of our crazy adventure if you actually got to the bottom of reading all of this! Shalom V'lehitraot!