Visiting the South of Israel Pictures – Part 2

Headed back from Eilat, we managed to reach the Hai Bar Wildlife Center in Kibbutz Yotvata on time both for the feeding of the predators and for booking our night at their campground. Later on, as I was walking around the campground, I noticed there were still some people hanging around and a ranger was calling them to join him. Turned out he was taking them on an unscheduled nighttime tour of the preserve! I jumped up and down in excitement and he was kind enough to let us tag along with our car. We didn’t get to see a lot of animals, but driving there at night was cool!

We were also the only campers in the campground, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. You can hear the road from the campground, but at least I got to hear the nocturnal predators twice during the night too. Not even sure if I was hearing hyenas, wolves, leopards or whatever, but it was nice.

Some pictures from our daytime tour of the wildlife center -

Note, if you open your windows to the ostriches and reach out, they do bite, as our Dan found out!

After our morning tour, we headed out to Timna (which is about 10 minutes away from Yotvata, so a very short drive). It’s a beautiful area with amazing geological features and a rich history as the site of the world’s earliest copper mines. The Pharos ran those mines, so there’s a ancient Egypt theme to the place.

Timna is a fairly large park, with lots of trails and places of interest. We decided to follow the arches trail, recommended to us by a local guide. It was great – not easy, with lots of climbs and some crawling through caves.

Our campground for the night was within Timna park itself and was right by the artificial lake they have there. The boys and their Dad had a blast pedaling on the lake for over an hour. Again, Friday afternoon and we were almost the only campers there, so they almost had the lake to themselves at some point.

The Timna visit includes filling up tiny bottles with layers of colorful sand as a souvenir. We have two of those now – and the kids had fun making them.

On our way back, we went through Makhtesh Ramon again, and this time stopped at a different point to see the Wall of the Ammonites, where you can see fossilized giant sea snails.

That’s about it! I have more pictures to share but didn’t want to put too many into a blog post. So, instead, I set up a page for Israeli Mom on Facebook. You can go there and view the full album, without becoming a friend or doing anything at all. I think you can even view the album without being a member of  Facebook.

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