Three Seas in a Day

On our way back from Jordan we decided to take a look at Aqaba – the Jordanian city on the Red Sea directly across from the Israeli city of Elat. Aqaba is a duty and tax-free port in Jordan and has lots of new hotels, clothing and jewellery stores, and many divisions of financial institutions seeking a duty and tax-free place to transact business … think of Dubai on a smaller scale. They were building an 1800 room 7-star hotel in Aqaba …. It was on something like 1000 acres of land. The size and scale was amazing.

After crossing the border and returning to Israel, we went up the road to Elat and found a tourist town with lots of hotels and resorts. The kids wanted to go to (gasp) McDonalds – which is really expensive here in Israel à burger fries and coke = $10, Marina and I opted to go to beach bar and sit in sofas and eat in a more leisurely fashion.




Matt testing the Red Sea.

 

We were on the shores of the Red Sea so we took the opportunity to go wading in it. About 20-22 degrees it was a little cold, though many hearty souls were swimming, but more reasonable than Vancouver gets until August anyway.

Marina and Jessie testing the Red Sea

After lunch we piled in the car and started towards home. We drove for another 2 hours and then stopped at a beach Ein Bokek, another resort. We put our swim suits on and floated in the Dead Sea. A normal human being has something like 1% saline in our bloodstream, when healthy the Med has salinity of about 3% … and the Dead Sea has salinity somewhere around 30% … hence why it’s Dead.

The net effect of the salinity is that you float much much higher in the Dead Sea than anywhere else you could ever swim.

After a quick bite, we again piled back in the car for the trip home to Herzliya. We arrived back to the boat and promptly put our feet in the water at the stern of the boat.

So …. In one day we were in the Med, the Red, and the Dead Sea … kind of cool eh?