On Friday, we drove from Zfad along the Lebanese border (more or less) to Rosh Hanikra, where we had tickets to take the cable car down to the grotto. The drive was quite beautiful, through a hilly, forested countryside past a number of small towns of various stripes and with occasional glimpses of Israeli border security.
Rosh Hanikra is right on the Lebanese border and right on the Mediterranean. The cable car takes you down a steep cliff:
to the space between two former railroad tunnels built by the British not long before the War of Independence. The idea was to connect Lebanon to Egypt, running through much of the British controlled territory, and to help them maintain control. Unfortunately (for them) a group of Israeli freedom fighters blew up the bridge between two of the tunnels (it was not clear if it was between these two or between one of these and a third one entirely within Lebanon. At any rate, the tunnels have been repurposed, with this one leading to the beach and a golf-cart-and-bicycle rental place (we did not rent either).
This one is now used to show a film about the tunnels and the natural processes that formed the caves of the grotto.
The grotto was formed by rainwater dissolving the limestone far enough to create crevices, and then a combination of further rainwater and the surf carving out a series of interconnecting caves. The cool thing about grottos anywhere is the wonderful color of the light bouncing through the water, not to mention the cool temperatures of caves, which was a welcome relief from the hot sun.
Although the beach south of the south tunnel is marked as a military restricted area with no entering the water allowed, it does seem to be okay to kayak through there to the grotto, which on this day of relatively calm seas was full of kayaks. Looked like a lot of fun.
A better view of the chalk cliffs the grotto is carved out of:
And at this end, you can see the fence and the military presence indicating the Lebanese border. If you could follow the cable into the water and out into the Mediterranean, you would see a series of buoys continuing the border out to sea. But those are things better seen with the human eye than the camera lens, so we didn't even try.
As the cable car gets close to the cliff face on the way up, you can see thousands of little pebbles either embedded in the limestone by wind and wave action or revealed as the softer chalk erodes away.
Driving further down the coast, we revisited Acre (aka Akko) because we still had some sites left on our combined ticket that included Rosh Hanikra and the sites we visited a couple of weeks earlier. Here, we are walking through the relatively new Turkish bazaar section of the market. A really good ice cream store is just at the left of this picture.
And the last site on our agenda was the old Turkish bath and "the story of the last bathhouse attendant." Another slightly hokey movie and animatron, but you got the idea. Fortunately, the baths were no longer heated, as it was plenty hot that day without any extra help.
Back to Dina's where we were invited for another Shabbat dinner, complete with 2 or 3 rabbis. As usual it started late and went long, but was a very pleasant evening, with everyone there either a native or a very competent English speaker.
Now we are in Oldenburg, Germany, where I was an exchange student 42 (!) years ago, and am back for the first time in at least 30 years.
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