City life proved a bit to much for me after all. One night I wake up in the pitchdark in a friends house - which is totally empty except for me. I imagine the walls around me, since I can´t see them. In one corner there´s a small window though, where a tiny amount of light is seeping in. The look out of this window I know very well - it´s a small indoor square with 20 meter high rising walls all around. Which in the end is not so different from the view out of the living room - walls on the other side of the street, and concrete and cars in between.

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Life can be so easy!

I always knew that I could go and live in Granada if I wanted to. Now I decided to actually go and do it. However, I wasn´t very much looking forward to having no place of myself while hunting for a room, and, more importantly, to spending Christmas and New Year without family or good friends nearby for the first time in my life.

But somehow things always figure itself out (of course!).

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The more I see of Israel the more I start to appreciate the diversity. Religious diversity: there of course jews, a large number wearing a small round hat (the kippa); there are conservative jews, dressed in black with an untidy beard. They pray standing up, small prayer book in the hand and while praying they bob back and forth all the time. Muslim Arabs are also to be found in many of the corners, and thus of course also mosques. There are also Christian Arabs, German Christian settlers (which are truly an category by themselves), Druze; a religion which keeps very much to itself, some major religious sites for the Bahai religion, and some Armenian Christians.

As far as nature is considered there are the Golan Heights - the one place in Israel where you can ski. There’s the Death Sea, the desert, the lake of Galilea, and probably other places of interest which I missed up to now. There are biblical places, Jerusalem, the Jordan river (I spent one morning watching the white-robed pilgrims getting baptised by their holy man. It doesn’t look so comfortable, but the official certificate of being baptised in the same place as where Jesus got baptised seems to make up for a lot.)

There are Palestinian territories here and there - the West-Bank is not, like I used to think, one big piece of Palestinian controlled territorry, but consists of about a dozen small chunks of complete Palestinian controlled territories. Of course, as soon as I thought about going to Israel, I knew already that I’d be going to Palestine. From several sources I get the impression that in Palestine the city of Jeriho in the West-Bank is a good place to visit. So one day I go to the road and hitchhike in the direction of Jeriho. The young guy who drops me of just outside the Palestinian territory asks me: “Do you want my telephone number, in case you need any help at all?” He looks a little bit worried, so I answer: “Well, I can give you a phonecall if I get out of Palestine to let you know that I’m allright.” He takes a long look at me, then smiles and says: “No, not necesarry, you’ve got the look of somebody who can take care of himself.”

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I’ve now spent two weeks and one birthday in Israel. A country many people only know from the news - news from which, of course, only a very skewed reflection of reality is created.

Reality finds me in a beautiful and, up to now, quiet country where hitchhiking is even more common and easy than I thought (to make travelling easier road signs are tri-lingual: Hebrew, Arabic and English).

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My goal - a rainbow gathering in Israel is finally coming nearer. I spent time in many differents marinas, sometimes bypassing security guards, sometimes getting help from them. But the main season is over and for getting a lift on a sailing- or motorboat one needs to have a little patience it seems.

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Hitchhiking in Turkey often seems as difficult as finding food in a supermarket - not a huge challenge! One sunny day I find myself hitching with my new 40 kilometer sign somewhere on the southcoast as a car with two Turkish women and one Dutch guy stops. They take me on a scenic tour with high rising reddish mountains and beautiful views of the mediterrean sea which shows some tiny islands in a blue sea. It’s a twisty road, and we pass trucks which are packed twice as high as their real height, and still contain some relaxed Turks on top of the load.

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