23 October 2019: Yardenit to Kfar Kish (~25km)

So, this was the leg over pretty empty terrain, with no towns or villages along the way that we postponed, because we were concerned that unless we started early we would not manage it in one day.

As a result we did the next leg – Kfar Kish to Nazareth Illit the previous day – because it was supposed to be a bit easier.  As you will have read, if it was, today was going to be brutal!

We left the hotel at 06:00 well laden with water and dropped the car just a couple of kilometers down the road at Kfar Kish before heading to Yardenit – buying provisions for lunch along the way.  The hotel had provided an excellent – and over-generous – packed breakfast and after eating that at Yardent we were on the trail by 7:30.  Our packs felt heavy but lightened up along the way.

We started well below sea level (the Kinneret is at an elevation of -200m) and after following the River Jordan for a couple of kilometres, the banks dotted with overnight campers and the river with early bathers, passed the early 20th Century kibbutzim of Degania and Degania Bet.  We then started a long steady 8 km climb up to the Eilot observation point at around 350m elevation.

The views from the Eilot observation point, and later from further on, across the Hula Valley to the Golan, north beyond Safed to Lebanon, east across the heavily cultivated Jordan river banks to Jordan and west across the villages and towns, Jewish and Arab, of the Galil, were simply stunning.

For the most part the track was pretty good – although in places there were (currently, at the end of summer) dry waterfalls to rock climb around of greater or lesser difficulty.  Compared to the previous day, it was a doddle.  Indeed, over the entire day we only climbed around 600m at most, compared to 1,200m or more on the Mt Tavos/Devora/Yona leg.

The route was very rural – cows grazing, apparently untended, olive groves, areas of fields with already harvested crops, dry yellow stubble. We rarely passed other people let alone ‘Shvilists’ but from Eilot it was largely a gradual downhill slope later through huge fields of carefuly planted, pruned numbered and tended fruit trees.

There was little of obvious historic interest to see until Tel Rakesh (although the trail passes by a 3rd Century CE synagogue and an early mosque, as well as an arab village abandoned in 1948) an ancient city mentioned by Thutmose III and his son Amonhotep II dating back to 1500 BCE.

By now we were walking in a valley longside the picturesque Nahal Tavor, still flowing freely despite months of no rainfall Kfar Kish slowly come into view.  By 4:00pm we were comfortably back in the car – it had been a long but pretty easy day after all…

It was the evening that brought out the blisters.  Ronnie had not tightened his boots enough, and I’d made the mistake of changing the insoles in my boots to orthotics.  We both suffered that night, but fortunately by morning we got ourselves comfortable enough to walk.

We again ate at קפהדרציה (Cafe Darcia); Kfar Tavor is a place worth returning to.  

The town was established in 1901 by pioneers of the First Aliya under the auspices of the Jewish Colonization Association.  Twenty-eight farmers settled in the area with the assistance of the philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild.  The new settlement was originally known as Mes’ha, the name of the nearby Arab village. It was renamed in 1903 at the urging of Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin who visited the site and was surprised to find it had no Hebrew name.

At first, there was some debate over whether to use the term kfar (“village”), which some residents thought would bode badly for future growth. Ussishkin responded that he had visited the German town of Düsseldorf, which had also originated as a Dorf, or village, but was now a full-fledged city.  The Rothschild administration determined that the site was ideal for cultivating grapes and the vineyards of Kfar Tavor became a supplier of grapes to the country’s wineries.  Indeed the town now has a Winery and restaurant.

In the Hameyasdim neighborhood, the core of the village, there is a museum and other sites, including the HaShomer house, the first school and teacher’s house (now a library) and a synagogue that was built in 1937.  Another school, built in 1911, now serves as the Shenkar Tzfira Music Center.  The main street of the neighborhood has houses left from the village’s early days, as well as parts of the wall that surrounded it.

I really liked the place.