Now I am fascinated by other people’s holiday pictures.
It’s partly about seeing places for free but is also an insight into what other’s see as interesting and significant.
And it has an added attraction when the photographs are from our Saul and Emilka who were in Eilat in southern Israel at the weekend.
They were there for a short break from autumnal Warsaw and I have yet to ask them how they judge that sniffy review from one travel guide that “the Red Sea resort of Eilat is brash, ugly and almost inevitably crowded, a place where being scantily clad and sunburned is the rule rather than the exception”.*
We have yet to go but it is a place I grew up with through the stories of the Exodus in the Old Testament.
Having made the crossing out of Egypt at the Red Sea the Israelites camped close to Eilat.
Later the place became a prosperous trading port and more recently the Romans built a road to connect it with Petra that “red rose city, half as old as time.”**
A city which “seems no work of Man's creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!”.**
Well I can’t better the poet John Burgon who wrote those lines but these pictures pretty much offer up the idea of that “eternal, silent and beautiful” place.
Location Eilat, 2017
Pictures; Eilat, 2017 from the collection of Saul Simpson and Emilka Cholewicka
* Eilat, lonely planet
**Petra, John Burgon, 1845
And it has an added attraction when the photographs are from our Saul and Emilka who were in Eilat in southern Israel at the weekend.
They were there for a short break from autumnal Warsaw and I have yet to ask them how they judge that sniffy review from one travel guide that “the Red Sea resort of Eilat is brash, ugly and almost inevitably crowded, a place where being scantily clad and sunburned is the rule rather than the exception”.*
We have yet to go but it is a place I grew up with through the stories of the Exodus in the Old Testament.
Having made the crossing out of Egypt at the Red Sea the Israelites camped close to Eilat.
A city which “seems no work of Man's creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!”.**
Well I can’t better the poet John Burgon who wrote those lines but these pictures pretty much offer up the idea of that “eternal, silent and beautiful” place.
Pictures; Eilat, 2017 from the collection of Saul Simpson and Emilka Cholewicka
* Eilat, lonely planet
**Petra, John Burgon, 1845
Gorgeous photos!
ReplyDeleteThank you all down to our Saul and Emilka
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