Cake For Breakfast: Driving to the Dead Sea and beyond

The next stop on our grand Israeli adventure was the Dead Sea. Because public transport to the Dead Sea is basically non-existent, we decided to rent a car, drive on the wrong side of the road and attempt to make it to the Dead Sea and then Eilat (another 250km south) in one day and one piece.

Bamba - the perfect road trip snack

A few words about Israeli drivers:

The speed limit is a recommendation and in 99% of cases, is not followed. One cute example from today, of which there are many, was when I was only going 10km over the speed limit and a friendly 4WD got up as close as he could and flashed his high beams to remind me I wasn't going fast enough... How thoughtful.
High beams are your night driving lights.
Indicators - unnecessary at all times. In fact, cars don't even need them. You should have seen the rental car guy's face when we asked him to point out which side the switch was for the indicators. It was like we told him kosher meant you could eat meat and cheese together.
Do what you want whenever you want and however you want. I have never never never in my whole entire life concentrated as much on a drive as I did today. Cars were coming at me left, right and centre. No indicating, speeding, in the middle of lanes. You name it, I saw it. But we got here in one piece and that's all that matters.

So, we made it to the Dead Sea in one piece. I YOLO'ed the hell out of the situation and recreated that famous photo of the person reading the paper (mine was Russian as that's all Mum had on hand) while floating in the Dead Sea.

For those geography buffs out there, the Dead Sea is smack bang in the middle of Israel and Jordan. When you drive beside it, the opposite bank of the Sea is Jordan. It's pretty cool. Jordanian radio was also a bit alright as they played songs that someone somewhere could call top 40, as opposed to all the talking (yelling) in Hebrew or Arabic on all the other channels. It made me giggle every time our favourite station described itself as the Kingdom's #1 radio station.

Post our Dead Sea fun, we started our 3 hour drive to Eilat (still on the wrong side of the road). I am a fairly huge fan of road trips and this one was amazing. The scenery moved from rocky to sandy to mountainy to slightly more rocky to barren to even more barren to gorgeous sunset over barren to the resort town of Eilat (think Gold Coast meets Las Vegas minus a million because it's Israel) ((also apologies for the photos, I was busy driving so Mum was in charge of that part and she is still obvs in training)).