by Jishi Santos

Created on: August 21, 2008

Ancient cities worthy of visiting

I have visited perhaps the six most ancient cities on the planet. Never did I plan the first five, Jerusalem, Jericho, and Knossos on Crete, Athens and Rhodes, which St Paul visited. Two years ago my wife and I visited Cairo, so that is six I shall talk about as worthy of visiting. There is something amazing which you can only feel if you are there standing on soil occupied by fellow humans, say 10,000 years ago. (for that is the age of Jericho the first of these I shall deal with.) The amazing thing is that you feel the age of these places just being there. You find your imagination imagining Joshua and the walls of Jericho, which have been partly excavated now. In Cairo you wonder at the pyramids and imagine the formation and building of these, the last of the ancient wonders of the world.

I said at the beginning that never did I plan the first five. I was working in Botswana in Southern Africa when my son flew to Rhodes to work. During the school holidays of the school, of which I was deputy headmaster, I flew to see him with my mother who had come to visit me. We could only get on an EL-AL jet, which meant a two day stopover in Israel on our way to Athens. Two days before we landed in Tel Aviv a bus carrying American tourists had been blown up so we met a taxi driver called Solomon who assured us we would be safe with him. He drove us down to Jericho on the road where maybe the Good Samaritan walked. The most striking landmark in Jericho is Temptation Mount, and typically there is the Temptation Mount bistro, a mark of modern tourism below where Jesus stood. It is very well laid out and worthy of a lunch time visit; you can get a large meal for 85 shekels. Jericho itself is a green oasis with channel irrigation watering orange groves and other fruit trees. But it is only an oasis, as all around the topography is harsh and barren. Take plenty of bottled water for the heat is more oppressive than you imagine. At the moment they are carrying out excavations of the ancient city wall and just outside the bistro you can see the rocks and stones of the walls uncovered. Take a camel ride here, it's good fun and would have been the mode of transport here all those years ago. There is a monastry carved out of the side of a cliff that you can see on your way out of Jericho, the oldest known city on earth. The monks use rope ladders to climb down and go about their daily business of shopping and other duties.

Jerusalem looks ancient as

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>