The Laughlins

We headed out on Saturday morning for the first leg of our trip. I had a topographical map (in Hebrew) for the trip, but the scale was still not such that we could tell how steep some of the mountains were (that will come into play later). We got some tea and coffee at a stand near the beach, and then started out to look for the trailhead. Unfortunately for us, Israel does not seem to mark things very clearly (or in this case - at all). We ended up asking a number of locals and traveling back and forth along the highway looking for the trailhead. After 2.5 hours of "hiking" (absolutely nowhere), we went into a memorial park of some kind and at the backside of the park, we finally found a rudimentary map showing that we had reached the trailhead.

Our first many kilometers were through banana fields. Many bunches of bananas had fallen off the trees and were laying on the ground. We figured that most of them were probably rotten (they were all brown - it is hard to tell), but we tried a few, adn they were pretty good. Ryan stole a whole bunch that he carried for the day - just kidding. He just held them for the a picture.





After the banana fields, we crossed a highway and ended up on a rough road that lead into the hills. We pulled off the trail in some shade and ate lunch - it was pretty warm out. Somewhere along the way, we saw a chameleon crossing the road. We even got to watch him change from light to dark green. Ryan let him crawl on his arm for a while.





After a few more kilometers, we entered the weed-covered territory (which we would see more of later), and a small stream formed to the left of the trail. Although the water was filled with algae and rather sparse at that point in the trip, there were many families playing in the small pools - stirring them into mud pools. Shortly after that, we got our first glimpse of Montfort's Castle. When we reached the base of the mountain (with the castle on it), we decided to split up a bit. Mark, Ryan, and Hayley climbed up the mountain (it was pretty steep), while Alana, Amanda, and I guarded our bags at the bottom, made tea, and (Amanda) played the penny whistle - which sounded quite beautiful. She is a master penny whistler :)





















After the other three came down, we continued along the trail that took us higher into the moutains. Soon we had lost sight of humans (for the most-part) and had a great view of the thick tree-covered hillsides. It was quite beautiful. Much of this hike reminded me of the mountains of Northern California. In fact, much of the flora and fauna were very similar. We came to a cliff-edge of sorts where we took our group picture, and then the trail began to descend a bit. We went under the tree canopy a bit, and the shade felt nice. It was evening by this point, and from what we could tell on our map, we weren't really going to come to any kind of civilization by the end of the day. We just wanted to be close so that we could re-stock on water and food first thing in the morning.















We found a beautiful campsite right near Nahal Kziv (the stream), which was now a fully-flowing stream. We camped right near a pool of water, and Hayley and I took the plunge after we set the tents up. We washed off, and Mark decided to follow suit a while later; the water was too cold for our other hikers. We collected firewood and started a fire for our evening and heated water for dinner. Ryan had a can of beans that he plopped right into the coals. It worked pretty well.





Partway into our dinner, I heard noise in the bushes behind us (near the stream), and swung my headlamp around, catching two glowing eyes. I informed our party that we had a guest, so everyone directed their flashlights toward the animal, and to our surprise it started coming towards us. We are pretty sure that it was a lynx - it looked about the size of a big bobcat, and Hayley and I saw one in the daylight the next day. Mark threw a rock towards it to scare it off, but it didn't scare very easily. We were camped fairly close to a garbage bin, so before we headed to bed, we saw a number of other lynxes wandering around the perimeter of our camp. Before we went to sleep, Ryan fashioned this great weapon out of a bamboo stick and his opened pocket knife duct-taped to the end of it like a spear. We all laughed in the morning. Mark and I didn't sleep much at all the first night, because it was hard to tell if the noises outside were lynxes or humans sometimes; sometime past midnight, some people did wander through our camp. At one other point, Mark and I got out to take a look around camp, but all was well.