Uncharted territories

One foreign diplomat decided to explore the West Bank’s natural beauty. The result is ‘Walking Palestine.’

By BARRY DAVIS
Stefam Szepesi 521 (photo credit: Sander Van Hoorn)
Stefam Szepesi 521
(photo credit: Sander Van Hoorn)
Captain Kirk, one presumes, would have probably have just asked Scotty to take him to a more spacious part of the universe. However, when Stefan Szepesi felt the need to escape the – for him – intensity of life in Jerusalem, he had no need for the warp-speed technology of the iconic Star Trek sci-fi TV series Enterprise spaceship. He simply crossed the Green Line to go where few Israelis had boldly gone before.
The result of the 30-something Dutch diplomat Stefan Szepesi’s forays beyond the city’s boundaries is a handsome and highly aesthetic tome entitled Walking Palestine, and subtitled 25 Journeys into the West Bank.
When most of us in Israel, in fact probably anywhere in the world, consider the West Bank it is more than likely that our thoughts run more along the lines of security and political issues rather than hiking possibilities on offer. That, at the very least, is the refreshing added value provided by Szepesi’s book.
An account of country trails of course lends itself to appealing pictorial augmentation, and Walking Palestine is duly replete with lovely pictures, all of which seem to have been taken in the spring, which is not a bad time of year to get out there. While that might lead the unsuspecting foreign reader to believe that the West Bank is a veritable verdant Garden of Eden, it doesn’t do any harm to show off the region in its best floral finery.
But there is far more to Walking Palestine than just informative descriptions of where to go, and how to get there. Many of the 25 trail chapters include practical tips about where to park, where to find flavorful sustenance, local attractions and accommodation, and references to online data. The accounts of the walks themselves are precisely detailed, with distances of each section given in both kilometers and miles, map coordinates, elevation changes, the types of surfaces the walker will encounter and whether the route is marked.
The book becomes an ever more attractive read with the appearance of subchapters about the history – naturally sometimes troubled – of each spot, which also bring the reader up to date on where things currently stand. In the chapter on Tirza’s Way: Al-Bidan to Al- Far’a, for example, Szepesi advises us that the ancient Tirza is mentioned in the Bible as the second capital of Israel’s Northern Kingdom (10th century BCE) and recounts the succession of conquering powers, including the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans.
A mention of the Christian and Muslim history of nearby Sebastia ensues, and the author incisively notes that: “The Holy Land is filled with countless Sebastias where human heritage is both very dense and very mixed, and where the strong currents of history have made any single categorization as Arab, Jewish, Palestinian, Christian, Muslim or any other label futile.”
Besides getting an urge to seek some wide-open spaces, Szepesi got an urge to check out the countryside in the West Bank during the course of his daytime job.
“I was in the West Bank so much for work, but never really in the West Bank,” says the Dutchman. “It was just Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, two to three times a week, and mostly Ramallah, which is just urban to urban. But when you go deeper into the West Bank you see what beautiful nature there is there, although you are never quite sure, because you see it through the window of a car, and that’s it.”
After escaping the constraining confines of Jerusalem to the regular haunts, Szepesi thought it was time to do something a bit more adventurous.
“I went to the beach in Tel Aviv, and to the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, to relax but when you’ve done that a couple of times you sort of get tired of it. So I started walking with a couple of friends just as a way to get out of the city, and also to get to know the Palestine beyond the headlines.”
Sounds easy enough, but then again, this is not exactly like taking a stroll through the Alps, or to the pleasantly undulating rural delights of England’s Lake District. This is a troubled part of the world enmeshed in a security morass and, presumably, one cannot just saunter off over the Green Line in search of some bucolic enjoyment.
As a member of the local diplomatic corps one might have thought that such considerations would be uppermost in Szepesi’s mind before placing foot in hiking boot. Weren’t he and his pals at all wary? “No,” he declares, “but we must have been terribly naïve, too,” he adds with a laugh.
Szepesi says they were not particularly well prepared for their forays through the Palestinian countryside. “We only had rubbish maps – Israel Road Atlas 2007, it only gives you roads in the West Bank, but nothing else – none of the villages.”
I put it to the Dutchman that, in fact, there were some trails in the West Bank that had been marked out by the Israelis post-1967.
“Yes,” he concurs, “but very few have been well kept. There is Wadi Kelt, which is still well maintained by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and there are a few others that are well maintained. But if you look at the maps of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, there are actually marked trails indicated in the West Bank but many of these routes don’t exist anymore and the marks are gone.”
So Szepesi and his pals initially had to largely manage on their own. But, as the author notes, he was soon surprised to find that he was not alone, and that there were some like-minded Palestinians who also enjoy a day out in nature. He also quickly discovered all manner of routes crisscrossing the region, from narrow rural roads to tractor tracks and herders’ trails.
SZEPESI APPEARS to be as good at navigating his way around potential political minefields as he was in getting around the West Bank on foot. He says that none of the hikes he undertook had to be curtailed due the construction of a settlement. In fact, if anything, it was newer Palestinian housing that got in the way. “There were some walks we couldn’t do because of Palestinian urban development, you know, a wadi being covered with buildings.”
The author actually took more walks than he could fit into the book, but he says he was looking at the long-term use of the book.
“I slimmed it down to 25, basically with the criteria of getting there and the chance of these walks being changed being relatively low, although, of course, it’s impossible to see into the future. But I tried to look ahead a little bit, so the book isn’t out of date within a month.”
In fact, Szepesi’s writing venture was not even a twinkle in his eye when he started out looking for West Bank hiking trails. He had another form of physical exercise in mind at the time.
“I thought that if I walk a lot [in the West Bank] I can find paths for biking, because I was really keen on mountain biking and I was doing a lot of it in the Jerusalem Forest, and other places like near Kibbutz Be’eri. Of course, the West Bank is mostly uncharted territory, so I thought maybe I can bike there.”
He soon had a change of mind.
“I quickly thought that it is so much nicer to walk, and it is more natural. Also, for Palestinians, seeing bikers is odd. Seeing walkers might also be odd, but bikers really stand out. That’s a different level of odd.”
The hiking started out with modest proportions – initially just Szepesi and five others, all foreign nationals, but interest soon spread appreciably. “We had an email group of European Union office staff, some Palestinians started to join and we went out regularly. It just started growing and growing. The whole thing started out with six people, now there are 249.”
Despite the incremental growth Szepesi says the activity remains unfettered by hardand- fast rules or intricate organizational logistics.
“There are rules to this group,” he explains. “If someone wants to propose a walk, they say ‘I want to go there. I want to meet up at this point.’ These walkers were all what we called the dummy hike readers because all these walks in the book were eventually tested by these groups. I would send a dummy map – not as good as the ones in the book – by email beforehand and people would go out and do it, and they’d give me feedback about how practical the walk is. Funnily enough, most of the feedback I got was about how to get there, rather than the walk itself. That’s how the book started developing.”
Everyone involved appears to have done a good job on the preparatory stages because Walking Palestine is both informative and entertaining. There are everyday tips on how to dress, how much water to take and sunblock to apply, a section of Palestinian public transportation and about being aware of wildlife. At the end of the book there is a handy glossary of local terms, and some basic vocabulary, in English, and transliterated into Arabic and in Arabic lettering.
One day, hopefully, the trails in Walking Palestine will be enjoyed by one and all.


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