On the tourist trail in the Holy Land – Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series by Jill Cartwright

The Wall We got lost on the way to Bethlehem of course and ended up circling around Jerusalem’s Ein Karem hospital getting confused by the signposts – or rather lack thereof.

Jerusalem is the city equivalent of a pretentious designer boutique whose luxurious and minimalist displays don no price tag – and, as the saying goes, if you have to ask you can’t afford it. In Jerusalem if you have to ask, you shouldn’t be there.

The attitude I get, and get every time I have driven in the city or been a passenger car with someone else in the city, circling round and round looking for just one sign to the bloody train station, is that Jerusalem has stuck its nose up at me, too good to put up signs for low-life Tel Aviv ragamuffin like me.

But we shouldn’t really have needed a sign post, it should have been obvious from the confused looks on the faces of people we asked – that the road to Bethlehem would be the emptiest road in the whole of Jerusalem. Three lanes all to ourselves. Finally a road in Israel where no one cut you off, stuck to your bumper, cursed and swore at you and burned past you on the inside lane.

A vast car park stood empty on the Israeli side of the entrance to Bethlehem and by it a recent system of signs and roadways that led through the new checkpoint. And running along the side, the dark grey concrete separation wall jutted out into the afternoon skies.

I had been warned by a friend that it was probably better to leave the car on the Israeli side and then catch a Palestinian taxi after the checkpoint, but the lone soldier in the booth as we drove towards the crossing assured me it would be fine and waved us through without even looking at our passports – passports I had assured my mother in tone of grave maturity that morning that we were sure to need.

I had been a bit worried about taking a car with Israeli plates into Bethlehem, but the vehicle had tourist rental motifs all down the side so I was quite sure we wouldn’t be taken for Mossad agents who’d taken a wrong turn somewhere around Gilo — and anyway I was traveling with my mother, in her large red sunhat and comfortable shoes. In the dictionary under “English tourist”, there’s a picture of her.

I felt quite adamant, however, about not to be taken for a mere tourist by the soldier on the Israeli side and with surprising insistence – probably fuelled by some deep ego-driven desire for recognition – had responded to his initial “Hello. Where are you from?” in my heavily accented yet proudly passable Hebrew. Once we got to the other side, however, I donned my own pink sunhat, speaking loudly in the Queen’s clearest English as if I’d just flown in for a two-week holiday. Is that terrible?

We drove on past the soldier in the booth and up to another soldier who stood hunched over his M-16, his eyes trained sniper like through the gun’s sights. He looked utterly focused, prepared, alert … but looking closer, I think he was actually half asleep, after all it was hot and the only action was a mother-daughter team in a rental car, faffing about checking they had enough film in their camera.

We left the orderly and empty checkpoint behind us and were at once accosted by a crowd of young and middle-aged men, who had been standing around their taxis smoking in huddles before our arrival had sparked such a flutter of activity.

I tried to drive slowly past them, raising my palms to the sky in what I hoped they would understand as my apologies that I would not be requiring their taxi-driving services, it being apparent that I was covered on the transport front, but Ahmed, one of the more insistent of them, was adamant I would never find my way into the town center, where the Church of the Nativity stands just off Manger Square, (it being “very far away”).

I smilingly agreed a fee to follow him in his taxi to the site, knowing full well that it couldn’t be that far away but not wanting to alienate or offend – and anyway they looked like they needed a bit of business – and at the same time ended up promising to engage the services of his brother to give us a guided tour of the church.

When we pulled into the empty lot behind Manger Square five minutes’ later, I was happy I had done both … My car seemed to be in safe hands with another of Ahmed’s friends who ran the car park and his brother turned out to be a superb guide and most knowledgeable expert on the church…

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