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Published: June 25th 2010
During my Summer Ulpan in August we read something about Masada and since that moment I really wanted to go there. The story of Masada is very interesting and unique. In 66 CE there was a war between the romans and the jews. The jews fled to this mountain in the dessert and made a place for the to live. The romans tried to conquer the village, but they failed several times because of the location. They lived on top of a steap mountain, with views all around. The romans were not able to climb the mountain or attack it from the ground. While climbing up the Masada mountain (now they have two paths: the hard one (snakepath) and the short one) you can see ruins of the roman camps that stayed at the foot of the mountain.
At one point though, the romans managed to find a way up. The jews did not want to give themselves up to the romans and therefore made a plan where 10 guys were chosen to kill everyone and out of those ten they chose one to kill the 9 left and then himself. The ruins left on the mountaintop show how people
The mountain
Oh and for the ones that think "no way I'm going to climb that" there is also a cablecar going up, takes just a few minutes. managed to live there as long as they did. For example, they have a miniature model that describes and shows how they managed to get water up to the village. Also there are old pigeon houses, that I thought they used for messaging, but it seems they used it as food, they ate the pigeons.
Me and my sis met up with Roee at 12am and started hiking up Masada by the snakepath, but the sun was on its hottest and it was really really hard climbing that mountain. But the view was worth the hard work. From the mountain you have a view on the dead sea and the surrounding mountains. Its a rocky desert around the dead sea and it is very beautiful.
Also there is an amazing museum in the Masada tourist center, located at the bottom of the mountain. I didn't go to the museum, but I know alot of people that were there and really enjoyed it.
After a long and tiring day of hiking in the heat we went to Ein Gedi Beach by bus, and camped on the beach for free! Since this was during Pessach, the whole beach was
filled by families (jewish as well as arab) cooking, setting up tents and offcourse enjoying the very unique Dead sea.
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