OK today was our Dead Sea day. We started by meeting Oded Rahav, Dead Sea activist) in the hostel and then driving through the West Bank to an abandoned hotel. The hotel was absolutely covered in graffiti and it was partially torn down. There were big holes in the wall broken glass and lots of trash laying all over the place, but the most noticeable thing was the quiet. Aside from icnext Cohort 11’s chatter, no other sounds could be heard in that vast, open desert. Oded explained that this used to be a hotel that was right next to the Dead Sea. He pointed to a fence line no more than 50 feet away from the hotel and explained that when he was a boy, the Dead Sea used to come up to that fence line. But as we looked out, we could barely see it over the horizon. The shore had been pushed back so far due to the fact that the Dead Sea is shrinking. This was a dramatic visual that really showed us the problem, and we understood the distress that the Sea is in.
We went to a few other sites around that area, still overlooking the Dead Sea. All of them were abandoned, dirty, and covered in graffiti. Some of the graffiti, however, had a message about saving the Dead Sea like what was found in the second site.
After seeing all these quiet, dusty, lonely buildings surrounding it, we arrived at the actual beach of the Dead Sea. To say this was a change in scenery would be too much of an understatement. It was like all of a sudden, any distress or realization of the drying up disappeared. All that mattered was buying the exfoliating mud, or the T-shirts, or smoothies from the “Lowest Bar in the World”. Any reminders or thoughts about having to save the Dead Sea kind of left our minds once we arrived at the tourist trap.
It just makes me think of all the people who come from around the world who don’t have the privilege of touring with Oded, and who don’t see the abandoned buildings where the Sea used to be. They just see what is there at that moment, and don’t realize that it could be gone in the next.