March 10

March 10, 2008 - 10:11

Just leaving Bet Shea'an, and I'm writing some of these details before I forget. It was founded, our guide believes, sometime in the 3rd Century BC by Antiochus IV (really rotten character as you will recall). The ruins as we saw them are from the Byzantine Era. It bears noting that the entire site was level ground before archaeologists started digging. Being completely covered by earth meant that a spectacular amount of the architecture is intact.

Bet Shea'an was the capital of the decapolis, and had an estimated population at its peak of some 50,000 people. An earthquake destroyed the city during the Byzantine era.

I'd write more but I've got to get my camera ready... turns out we're going through a West Bank checkpoint!

13:40

Well, there are now photos of me on a camel. And speaking of photos, I have discovered, in my frustration with trying to get pictures from a bus (there are some advantages to traveling by oneself as well!), that I have gotten pretty good at the photographic equivalent of a Hail Mary... out of sheer necessity. Digital cameras take a good deal longer to get going than a normal point-press-n'-pray, so a lot of times, if we're moving, the subject is long gone by the time the camera is ready. I have several shots--certainly not National Geographic quality, mind you--that I just snapped in the general direction of where the subject was in passing... and they came out!

This has also come in handy in a few instances where the subjects might perhaps not *like* being subjects... such as Israeli and Palestinian checkpoints into and out of the West Bank (complete with automatic machine guns in guard towers, aimed squarely at passing vehicles), fully armed Israeli soldiers hanging out in the restaurant where we are eating, plainclothes officers with automatic rifles slung more or less surreptitiously over their shoulder, camera-shy Druze, etc., etc.

At the moment, we're headed toward the Dead Sea. We've been going DOWN for quite awhile now. Makes sense going to the lowest point on the earth, I suppose. How cool is that?