Sde Boker and the Negev

This was one of my favorite tiyulim this whole trip and I had been looking forward to it for a long time. For the first day we visited the house of Ben Gurion which was in Sde Boker. As you can see in my picture, he had fairly nice home with some good reading books. He lived in this house with his wife but slept alone. This is where he lived until he died. We then went on a hike to Ein Avdat where we could see 4 countries, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. This was very cool. As you can see in my picture, the view was amazing so I had to get a picture with Aubrey Isaacs my teacher. After this we drove down to the very southern point of Israel, Eilat. There we stayed the night and had a very meaningful discussion with our Israeli Studies teachers about anything that we wanted to ask them. The next day we went to a really cool Flamingo viewpoint. We ate lunch there and were able to walk up around 30 yards away from the Jordan-Israel Border. That night and the next night we stayed in Kibbutz Lotan. They are super eco-friendly. In my picture there is a solar cooking space that caught dried out reed on fire in less than 5 seconds. It gets really hot and doesn’t use any gas. Then we went on a really cool hike on  Mt. Yoash with a view of where would eventually be going snorkeling. The gulf of Eilat is below as you can see in the picture on the right. After the hike we went snorkeling and that’s super cool and fun. This tiyul was super fun and an awesome trip for a sort of end of semester. I really enjoyed our discussion with the teachers, and the snorkeling. I also thought it was really cool to be able to see 4 countries at once, especially since I had never seen most of them before and never thought that I would in my life, like Saudi Arabia or Egypt. - Jacob