The Verbose Traveller

Final moments enjoying the view from our balcony overlooking Haifa. Today has been a changeover day as we transitioned from Haifa to Netanya. But first we wanted to make the most of our last couple of hours in Haifa, so we headed up to stroll along the Louis Promenade, situated at the top of the Carmel Ridge, with yet more lovely views over Haifa and the north. Then we found a little cafe tucked away behind the main shopping strip, and enjoyed a relaxing coffee and a “read” of the newspaper in their little courtyard. Thank goodness for pictures!! Looking like he knows what he’s reading........... Our home away from home was the right half of the top floor. After that it was time to farewell our home for the past 4 nights and head off to Netanya, a pretty city on the Mediterranean coast about halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and the starting point for our tour. It took us a little more than an hour to drive there, with Waze for the win again. We dropped our ...

Haifa turned on beautiful weather for our last full day, heralded by a lovely sunrise. We had a few things on the plan (yes, there’s pretty much always a plan), but it was definitely going to be a quieter day - no hustling to read about crusaders or invaders, no rushing to get through tourist attractions, and a fair bit of flexibility which is always nice. And as far as navigating goes we’ve gotten quite used to using Waze in the car, and the son of our dinner hosts last night helped us to work out the settings (all in Hebrew) so that we now at least have English text for the menus. So we ditched Google maps completely and found silent Waze to be more than adequate. Our first stop was the University of Haifa, high on Mount Carmel, where the main administration building has an observation deck on the 30th floor with the most expansive views over Haifa, the Mediterranean, and far to the north and east. This I discovered while researching Haifa, and once we got through security (yes...

I've raved about TripAdvisor before, but TA is  definitely responsible for this part of our trip. Following links can be quite serendipitous at times, and this is no exception. I clicked on a link in someone else's post and discovered Betzavta - an opportunity to dine with an Israeli family. After reading about the concept, and reading other people’s reviews, we decided this would be a great opportunity to go beyond the tourist options and get to know Israeli culture and society from within. So we booked a Betzavta dinner with a family in Haifa, and that’s where we spent yesterday evening. Our hosts, M & Y, and 3 of their 4 children (aged from 28 to 14), welcomed us into their home for a delicious meal and a wonderful evening of conversation and lots of laughs. The family describes themselves as “reformed Jews” - culturally and ethnically Jewish, they know the Torah, but they are not overly “religious” and believe that there is more than one way to work out faith in...

As if Haifa isn’t far enough north, there are a couple of other really interesting locations even further towards the Lebanese border - the old town of Akko, and the grottoes at Rosh Hanikra. We figured it would be a pretty full day, so we set off “early” and arrived at Akko around 9.30am. Only a half hour drive in the end. We did the Google maps offline navigation thing again, but also decided to test out the in-car navigation app called Waze. You can use it in Australia too, but according to Israeli helpers on TripAdvisor it works really well in Israel (it was designed in Israel after all), much better than Google maps. The only drawback for us is that all the menus are in Hebrew and since we couldn’t read any of it we couldn’t select an English option!!! However, we discovered that we could type into the fields in English and it coped fine with that too. Unfortunately we couldn’t get an English voice, but we still had the very clear map to go by. Running the two side by side con...

Oh yes we did!!! Walked and walked and walked, and somewhere along the way hubby realised that all this time, he’d been thinking that when I said “I’ve planned a cruisy day” I meant we will sleep in, relax on the balcony, read a book, drink cups of tea and enjoy the view, when what I ACTUALLY meant is that we will walk. And walk. And walk some more. Glad we cleared that up! Walking Haifa is no mean feat. Haifa is built on the northern slope of Mount Carmel, so there is up and there is down, but there is very little “on the flat”. It reminded me a bit of walking in West Hobart, on the slopes of Mount Wellington, with the harbour below. Our day started with a short hike up the Gedera Stairs near our apartment - the first set of steps for the day - which took us to Yefe Nof Street, and just a little way along was the top entrance to the world-renowned Baha’i Gardens. While we’d initially intended just to wander through (down, down, down the steep hill on which they’re built) we...