Well, today, after a lot of anticipation (and with some trepidation on my part) we started the Israel National Trail.
Getting to the start was not entirely straightforward. Conscious of the likely heat (it was to reach 42C!) we wanted to start early, and that meant a 4:15am start for me to drive to Ronnie’s home in Pardes Hanna where I met him and Rafi. A quick coffee, and then we drove two cars up to the Galil, grabbing another coffee, and a croissant, just before Kiryat Shemona.
Strictly, the trek we planned for our first day is not part of the INT, which starts at Kibbutz Dan. However, the superb Guide book ‘Hike the Land of Israel: The Israel National Trail’ by Saar and Henkin (essentially the INT bible), recommends starting in the Golan with a one-day hike from Neve Nimrod. So, that was our plan.
We started the day with a bit of a car dance. We left my Peugeot in Kibbutz Dan (at the official start to the INT) and then drove on in Rafi’s Forester to Neve Nimrod to start the walk.
Even then there was a false start as after about ten minutes I realised I’d left a water bottle in Rafi’s car and needed to go back for it. That wasn’t my only memory lapse – I also left my walking pole (brought to help with an inflamed Achilles tendon in my left ankle) in the car; but by the time I had remembered that it was too late to go back. A sign of age… although apparently it’s OK if you forget a different thing each day, just so long as you don’t forget the same thing every day…
So, although we had hoped to be on the trail by around 8:00am, it was three quarters of an hour later that we finally set out on a very pleasant downhill stroll to Ein Kiniya, a pleasant and apparently affluent Druse village of just under 2,000 people. It is one of the four Druze-Syrian communities on the Israeli Golan Heights, together with Majdal Sams, Majdal and Buq’ata. On the way, Rafi pointed out a number of sites and villages we could see on the way, as the entire northern Galilee and part of Lebanon spread out before us.
There was a delightful peace about Ein Kiniya. Druse flags and also a variety of national flags – Portuguese, French, and others – flew from different houses, reflecting we guessed different World Cup loyalties. The village was quiet and peaceful, and an elderly farmer in the main street offered us peaches from his tractor trailer. It was the first example of what we came quickly to discover. The entire INT experience may be drawn by the trail, but it is coloured in and brought to life by encounters and experiences along the way, with people and with history.
From the village we walked uphill along a good road to Nimrod Castle, a massive fortress built around 1229 by Al-Aziz Uthman, the younger son of Saladin, to pre-empt an attack on Damascus by the armies of the Sixth Crusade. 
In 1260 the Mongols captured the castle, dismantled some of its defenses and left their ally, the son of Al-Aziz ‘Uthman, in charge of it and the nearby town of Banias. After the subsequent Mamluk victory over the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, Sulthan Baibars strengthened the castle and added larger towers. At the end of the 13th century, following the Muslim conquest of the port city of Acre (Akko) and the end of Crusader rule in the Holy Land, the fortress lost its strategic value and fell into disrepair. It was badly damaged by an earthquake in the 18thCentury.
We spent around 45 minutes touring the Castle – particularly struck by the stupendous views, the apparent impregnability of the site and the quality of the construction. The water cisterns were still full – albeit the stagnant water is now mainly a home for endangered salamanders…
We probably stayed too long at Nimrod. Higher up there had been a freshness to the air and a very pleasant breeze. Now it was getting hotter, the wind was dying and, as we descended the steep and rock-strewn trail from Nimrod, the temperature rose rapidly and the walk became much more strenuous.
It took around an hour and a half to reach Banias at the foot of the mountain and it was a real pleasure to find the refreshment hut in the National Park. Coming in from the INT we found we had avoided the payment booths – unlike at Nimrod where Rafi had to pay (although Ronnie and I had free entry because of our annual Israel Nature Parks passes).
I hadn’t been to Banias for nearly 50 years and had forgotten how interesting it is. There is the spring, a source of the Jordan, and beautiful ponds, falls and trails. There are also the remains of a temple built by Herod the Great, of his son Philippi’s capital (Caesarea Philipi) and of a Crusader city.
But, it was now both past midday and seriously hot and so we pressed on, following the stream. We passed under a beautiful Roman bridge, and then the only surviving workable water-powered flour mill in Israel – the Matroof mill – and the Officer’s Pool used by Syrian officers before 1967.
In all we walked around 3.5km through a beautiful and verdant canyon (with a suspended path over some striking rapids) before branching off towards Kibbutz Dan. It was uneventful until around 0.5 km from the car when I got extreme cramp (I don’t think I’d eaten enough) which didn’t really let off until we arrived, around an hour or two hour later than we had originally hoped, at the Beit Ussiskin car park at the real start of the INT where we’d left the Peugeot. It was seriously hot but we had covered a decent distance and lost over a kilometre in height: here is what we did.
We now though had to drive back to Neve Nimrod to collect Rafi’s car, and then drive south again past Dan for around 30 minutes to reach our accommodation for two nights at Malkiya, a kibbutz around 25 minutes south high up close to the Lebanese border. By then I was getting an interesting but intermittent display of warning lights on the Peugeot dashboard.
Malkiya is a friendly and delightful place, with green lawns and simple but large clean chalet rooms with an en suite shower and a kitchenette.
We were pretty tired and our plans for a quiet afternoon reading by the pool had not worked out. Basically, we just crashed out, showered and went for an early dinner.
On our way we visited the memorial at Malkiya and chatted to a lady who had been at the kibbutz for 60 years who was having a video made for her birthday. The views are spectacular over the entire Hula valley and the Golan Heights, and the history of the place so typical for the kibbutzim in the area.
The kibbutz was established in March 1949 by six former Palmach soldiers who had been demobilised at the end of the War of Independence. It is named after the depopulated Arab village of al-Malkiyya, which in turn had retained the name of the Jewish biblical village of Malkiya – a priestly family from biblical times (Nehemiah 10:4) – on whose lands it was established. The important Canaanite and biblical city of Kedesh lies just below it.
The memorial photographed here says more about its foundation.
After dinner we sat outside and drank a glass of wine each – made from grapes grown by the kibbutz and given us when we checked in. It was a beautiful still night. It was hard to believe we were just a couple of hundred metres from Lebanon. During the evening we heard gunfire. Training? A celebration in the nearby Lebanese villages? Skirmishes in the Golan? We didn’t know. It was surreal.
Hiking the Israel National Trail 