Stardust | Israel today

A quarter to dark,

visitors enter Timna Park, the southern tip of the Arava.

I order an inverted coffee with milk.

Why Starbucks did not succeed in the country, my house asked on the way, because their orders were too long and complicated, I replied, we Israelis, like it simple, delicious and interesting.

The coffee beans gather in the glass, the saleswoman pulls out a carton of milk and froths, look, Dad says my daughter, it is written that the milk comes from the Golan, does it not make more sense to buy it from the dairy in Yotvata that we have just passed?

Yes, I answer, but we Israelis, like it too complicated and twisted.

"Yes, yes, the whole point is to drink something cold in the heart of the desert," said Rebbe Meir Ariel, who wrote the text in the song "At Noon." In the sharp, dull senses of the roads, Ariel moved the wild west to the torn south. Defeat the wilderness in a deep-rooted duel within us as Israelis who begin in Siberia or Hollywood with a revelation, and flee on the asphalt from the crumbling cities to the quiet lagoons of Eilat.

Only when Ariel meets her nose protruding from the shadow of some local from Yeruham does he perceive the ridiculousness of the situation. Here the Gary Cooper are totally demicolo. No avenger will come to Yeruham at midnight today. Ariel realized that the way to mature from the childish need to empty the void is to accept it as it is. Of the outdoors, plateau fans to hunt for a cell phone signal, air conditioner ice from here and there, shepherds of cows and villages to a free chocolate trough in Yotvata, prairie riders with coffee breaks and toilets too often along the long road to Ayala.

For too many years the prairie has been a mini-Texas in front of the Red Mountains. The edges of the long road contained a lot of darkness, few lights and spaces that allowed Westerns to run. But in recent years the side of the road has come to life and started telling a new story. A rock festival, eco-fun at Kibbutz Lotan and many other events, and of course guest rooms in every locality. Suddenly what was just "The Road to..." Became the thing itself, a unique and fascinating land, an attraction in its own right.

"When I started working here, they called the tourism project 'Derech HaArava', I told them 'friends, if we do not change the name, we will stay as something on the road and we are not the road, we are a destination in itself and thanks,'" says Little Shmueli, director of tourism in the southern Arava. That the Arava attracted like a magnet from the center of the country to the southernmost kibbutz in the world - Eilot.

"This year we have proven that we stand on our own two feet - wherever you look, you see it happening, the events in Timna Park, a farmers market, more and more and more day and night activities, you can not come here for one day, there is just so much to do here, always There was, but tourism was not properly packaged for visitors. '

We visited the Starry Nights at Timna Park.

Every summer, the sky is bombarded with meteor showers.

But the light pollution of the big cities in the center of the country, raises the falling stars.

To this end, hundreds of astronauts and space enthusiasts from all over the country have gathered and come to hunt stars that fall from the truly black sky.

Yuval Feder the Great Bear,

We are on a night tour,

and in the warm darkness, through the car windows, Timna Park looks like the perfect backdrop for a local horror movie. A narrow road, road dust screens the visibility, signs warning you not to get off the track, and huge rocks towering on all sides. If that's not scary enough, already at the first stop a terrible breaking cry of one of the infants comes up - "Ummmaha, what is it ?! There is no internet reception here at all! Have we reached the end of the world? ' Without confusion, the mother of the VIP child replies, "Cute, this is not the end of the world, this is the beginning of the world."

The telescopes are spread around the pillars of Solomon, the guide aiming them with lasers at the stars. Her words are repeatedly interrupted when one of the mothers notes in a deafening whisper every falling star she sees, and there are many.

The kids line up to watch the stars. Every light touch moves the telescopes. On Earth it is a few millimeters, but in space it is a displacement of thousands of kilometers. "Can't you fix the telescope?" Rotten ordered impatiently from the wait. "He's put on amazing technology to see stars, in the middle of the desert, and he's upset that he needs to aim ?!" grumbled another parent. When it's our turn, we get a magical glimpse into Saturn's 'devil ears', and the moons of justice, including righteousness that we are completely satisfied with.

The caravan continues to Lake Timna. The transition from a dark desert and countless stars to an artificial lake full of vegetation, bright and electrified - amazing. Oasis speakers offer not to look back angrily, and pleasant diners linger on the lake shores with pizza trays and chickpea cartons. All around you can find every possible form of accommodation - from tent camps, to glamping tents - luxury camps with air conditioning and lighting - and of course caravans. "Shhh, don't disturb," one of the mothers hesitates her son, "this is our next home" and points to the big screen - Mars.

The space adventures of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson turn the virtual star tour of the Stellarium into a real estate conference - what is the summer temperature record of Mars?

Where is there water?

"Do not believe Ayalon Musk, it's still not comfortable to live there," reassures the lovable Ophir from the observatory "The Big Bear," "When we want to live on Mars, we will have to deal with the lack of oxygen, and the frozen ice. , Where the temperature is a total of 6,000 degrees, in the shade.

So now you value our atmosphere more, atone for it, here in Timna. '

In recent years, Timna Park has become known as a space for successful environmental struggle.

Yaniv Golan from Kibbutz Samar has written two fascinating books about how a coalition of environmental organizations and local forces managed to thwart the lust of realtors to build a huge hotel and shopping complex in the heart of the park. Instead, the hotel will be built near the Arava Road.

Yaniv Cohen, Timna,

"Nature is the most important thing to us,

so we do not harm it," says Omar Armoza, the park's enthusiastic manager. We estimate that at the peak of the rain we can expect up to 100 meteors per hour. We knew there would be a great demand, so we restricted the crowd, we divided the viewing over a few nights so that it could be enjoyed without stress, and if you do not have enough in August, star tours are also expected for October. "

I ask him to explain to me what Timna's obsession is with the pharaonic Egypt - the huge figures on the road, the pharaohs in the souvenir shop, did you not hear that we left Egypt?

Omar is amused.

'The first archaeologist who was here, Ben Rotenberg, dated the copper mines to the time of King Solomon, so they were called Solomon's Pillars.

After that, the new archaeologists came and decided that these were mines from the Egyptian period, that's how the Egyptian section of Timna began, but in recent years Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, who uses advanced dates, has dug here and found that most of the mines are from the David and Solomon period.

Now I understand the liquidation prices on the pharaonic collection at the souvenir shop.

And who knows, maybe by the next time you come to avoid on your way to space, the pharaohs will be replaced with snowballs of the Temple, figures of King David as a hero on space, and the incense dispenser will be shaped like Abraham's wife (the third), and King Solomon's candlesticks will light a thousand women.

The Israeli future continues to be written from its past even on the way to the stars.