Crazy Adventure

I went on a hike a few days ago with my friend Eli. We decided to go about 7 PM on a Wednesday night. We leave our apartments at 10 PM on a bus to Tel Aviv. We take a sherutim, which is like a big taxi that has special prices to and from big cities, to Jerusalem. In the middle of the drive we tell the driver to drop us off at this highway exit that Eli's friend told him about. We knew that the hike that we wanted to do the next day was around this exit. So we get out of the sherutim at this place:

Next we decide to look for a place to sleep. Seeing as it was about 12:15 AM we were hoping for a secluded forest or something to set up camp. We wandered up a hill and through this path until we found out that we were in Castel, a state park that is the site of a battle in 1948 when Israel fought for its independence. We walked towards the top of Castel, which was a military fortress, and found a nice, remote spot to set up camp. We unrolled our sleeping bags and slept for a bit. Our camping spot looked like this:

We woke the next morning and began our trek towards the hike. We got some directions from a park ranger and a random lady and started walking along a high way. After walking for some time, I saw a turnoff from the highway and we checked it out to see if we could find the hike. We were looking for Sataf, a marked hike, so we needed to find trail markers. We couldn't find anything and were a bit discouraged because we had been walking for about an hour. We were going to turn back because Eli's friend told him we maybe took a wrong turn some 4 km back, but we decided to walk for another two minutes before turning back. We walked for 15 seconds around a bend and saw a huge sign for Sataf.
We walked to the top of a mountain were the beginning of the hike began and stopped for a quick tea and cake at a restaurant that is up there. The waiter there gave us a handy map and we began our trek down the mountain towards some cool springs and tunnels. The hike was a really beautiful showcase of the Judaean Mountains. Jerusalem is actually a huge city that is built in top of several large hills/mountains. Their size is somewhere between hills and mountains, but the Israelis call them mountains. So this hike was down one of the mountains and was really amazing. The mountains all have ancient terraces from thousands of years ago. Terracing is a farming technique that levels out hills so that you can grow plants on them. Here are a few terraces and other things that we found there:






The springs that we found were really developed in ancient times. They are now tunnels that you can walk or crawl through and it's really cool. This is what the springs looked like:
In the middle of the hike we met a group of school children who were more than ecstatic when they heard that we were from America. At the end of the hike we found ourselves pretty far from town and we needed a way to get back. We asked the teachers of the school for a hitch into Jerusalem and after some conferring they decided to lend us a hand and they drove us for about 20 minutes to a bus stop. From there we went into town and ended the adventure with some shwarma.