Golan Heights
Trip Start
Jul 16, 1975
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10
16
Trip End
Jul 15, 1976
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Banias, Northern District, Israel
Tuesday, March 16, 1976
My tour came within a few hundred yards of the Syrian border. It's just two barbed wire fences separated by about 10 yards of no-man's land. No tanks. No noise. No guards. But there are a few abandoned fortifications. This is also land Israel recently gained control of.
I liked visiting Banias. The temperatures are much cooler at this elevation. And the scenery is definitely more green. Banias is one of the three sources of the Jordan River.
Most interesting to me were the crypts carved out of the rocks. They may have been pagan altars in the past, but I still had to crawl up and sit inside them. To me, they resemble the more famous rock carvings in Petra, Jordan. Probably from the same culture or the same era. Somehow I thought that the political borders that exist today were always that way.
Eric
