The second part of my trip to the Holy Land took me outside of Jerusalem to explore the rest of the country. Leaving Jerusalem as another terrorist incident occurred, I boarded my bus that drove eastwards towards the Dead Sea. Whilst Jerusalem and the area around was very hilly, eventually you get to a huge valley, marking the border with Jordan, which at the bottom is the Dead Sea. As you then wind down the hill side there are some plaques denoting the elevatio...

My final day in the capital consisted of visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, which when I visited was absolutely full of tourists, including groups of Israeli soldiers, all with their huge guns. The museum has recently been improved and expanded, with it now being built through a hill. Entering on one side you walk through a Toblerone shaped building with rooms located on each side beginning with the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s, and en...

Having clearly not stalked Jesus enough, I took an Arabic bus from just outside the Old City to the supposed place of his birth, Bethlehem. The town is in Palestinian controlled territory, but entering caused no problems. I got off at the last stop, on the main road, and then walked up the hill, through the souq, and arrived in Manger Square just outside the Church of the Nativity. Once again avoiding the touts, I headed inside, and joined the long queue to...

Waking up nice and early in Jerusalem, I grabbed breakfast from downstairs and then headed off for the Haram el-Sharif/Temple Mount, racing through the Old City and past the Western/Wailing Wall, making the queue by 8:10. The complex is only open for three and a half hours a day, from 7:30 until 10:00, and then 12:30-1:30. With major security checks I had read that the queue was particularly long, and already by the time I was there, the queue was pretty long. N...

The working world means I have much less time for holidays....but more money to spend on them! And my latest adventure took me to Israel. Whilst the country is absolutely teaming with history, it also has, as we know, a huge problem with terrorism. Unluckily for me, just a few days after it was all booked, the latest trouble erupted this summer. Fortunately by the time I went, the worst of it was over. But I had done a lot of researching and prepared myself for ...