The Dead Sea

On my last day in Israel, I got off work with just enough time to drive 1.5 hours to the Dead Sea before the sun went down. Driving through the West Bank is akin to being on Mars; it is very desolate, hot, arid, and shows absolutely no signs of life. The only water present is so saturated with salt that nothing can live in it, nor can it even come close to being used as a refreshing respite for a parched traveler. The Dead Sea is aptly named.

the road to the Dead Sea

yours truly at a roadside vista with the Dead Sea in the distance

a resort appears as an oasis

I pulled over near a hotel resort and had some time to take a float in the Dead Sea. It is a feeling that everyone should experience at least once in their life. Put this on your bucket list. I would argue it is worth the plane ticket just to have this experience. Imagine walking out into an oily hot bath only to have your feet float out from under you. You float on top of the hot salt water with zero effort and bask in the sun with a feeling of zero gravity. As you move, the viscous liquid flows around you in ways that make you appreciate all those lectures in fluid mechanics. You suddenly become aware of the differing buoyancy of your different body parts. Lying on my back, if I lift my leg out above the surface, my overall weight stays constant while my displacement lessens....and I sink an extra inch in the water. If I use my muscles to force my legs deeper into the water, my displacement increases so my body floats a little higher on the surface. You simply cannot get this graduated level of buoyancy in regular water nor can you experiment like this because, in regular water, you are usually expending a great deal of effort just to stay afloat. Now I am floating with zero effort. It actually takes effort to attempt to sink. I fail to completely submerge my body. This is fun....I start to laugh....out loud. As other tourists delight in a similar ethereal experience, they too giggle and profess their fascination in their many different languages. You can tell immediately who is a first timer by their giddy expressions. You can soak in the salt water for hours and the skin on your hands does not pucker, it looks the same as when you got in. When you get out of the water, the drops never dry and you do not experience evaporative cooling, despite the fact that it is a very hot and very dry climate. The minuscule amount of water in the drops on your skin is so tightly bound by the salt molecules that they will not let the water release into the air. Eventually, however, evaporation slowly wins and you are left with a thin layer of salt crystals coating your skin.
After a quick rinse, I hit the road for a final trip to the hotel to get my stuff and head to the airport for my return trip home. It was a memorable trip, but hopefully next time I will have more time to see the rest of the country.

Floating on the Dead Sea was a relaxing way to end a trip that was anything but relaxing.