Mitzpe Ramon

Mitzpe Ramon is a huge crater in the southern part of Israel. People here call it the "Grand Canyon of Israel." That is a bit of a stretch. It is a rather large crater, but definitely not compared to the Grand Canyon in the US. Because Mitzpe Ramon is in the Negev Desert, everything in the crater and around it is all the same dusty, sandy, tan. When we first arrived at the crater the view was quite amazing but quickly lost its amazement because everything looks the same. The rock formations are cool, but once you've seen hundreds of rock formations in less than an hour, they sort of lose their coolness. We arrived in Mitzpe Ramon at around 1pm with my grandparents and their friends, Bonnie and Rob. My grandparents and Bonnie and Rob are neighbors and friends in Burlington, Vermont. Once we settled into our hotel, my parents, Rob, and I went off for lunch knowing that after lunch we would go hike down part of the canyon. Bonnie and my grandparents went off to visit one of my grandma's friends who lives in the town of Mitzpe Ramon. For lunch we went to the one café in the tiny town of Mitzpe Ramon. The food was very good at the café. I got a Greek sandwich, which had roasted red peppers, super fresh feta cheese, big delicious olives, and baby lettuce in a fresh-out-of-the-oven ciabatta bread. The sandwich was definitely one of the best I have had in Israel. A fact about most Israeli meals is that they are almost always HUGE. Appetizers are usually like the size of entrees in Portland. This fact was completely true about my sandwich, when they asked me if i wanted it on ciabatta or whole wheat bread and I said I wanted it on ciabatta I didn't realize that they were going to give me the entire ciabatta! So I only ate half of the sandwich. After lunch, we walked to the visitors center because that is where the hotel said we could pick up a map about different trails. When we got to the visitors center they told us that we didn't have a lot of time because people have to be back on the main road by 4:30pm and it was already 2:30pm. We were a little upset about this but still made our way towards the rocky and dusty trail that would take us down to the bottom of the trail. We decided that we would walk part way down the trail and do the rest the next day. The trail was very rocky and steep and was very difficult to climb down. It took quite a while to get down the first part, but after a while there weren't as many rocks and the trail got a lot easier and we moved faster. We probably got about halfway down before we decided to turn around because we were getting tired and it was getting near 3:45pm. For my parents it took around as long as it took to get down to get up, I ran up the trail. I don't really know why I decided to run up but it was definitely a great workout. I made it up at least three times faster than my parents did. Once we got back from the hike and had showered, all seven of us went out to the other restaurant in the town for dinner. I got a bowl of soup that my dad and I were going to share and then he would share his chicken with me. The first part worked, but because I didn't like the chicken I ended up eating a lot of bread for dinner. Breakfast the next day wasn't any better than dinner the night before. Breakfast consisted of very stale bread, wilted vegetables, and some disgusting jam. This hotel definitely wasn't known for its breakfast! But lucky for me, I still had the other half of my sandwich from lunch the day before! That sandwich had never tasted better. :) After "breakfast," my parents and I decided that we weren't going to go down the crater again because my mom's knees hurt and it was already really hot outside. So we decided that we would just walk around the rim of the crater. The walk around the rim looked the exact same as the walk in the crater except that we weren't walking on a hill. The only difference was toward the end of the walk when we saw a group of at least twenty Ibex! The Ibex were so cool to see up close! My dad had gone home to shower so my mom and I were just sitting on a rock taking a break when I turned my head and said, "Mom! Look! Ibex!" They were just sitting there and when a big tour bus drove by they didn't move. So lucky for us, they weren't scared of humans. This was good because we could get close to take pictures. Mitzpe Ramon was definitely an interesting experience!