Israel

Israel hit differently from anything I'd expected. Jerusalem was the first jolt — you walk through the Old City and suddenly the centuries are all stacked on top of each other. Crusader stone underfoot, Byzantine mosaics overhead, the call to prayer echoing off the same walls where church bells ring ten minutes later. Standing at the Western Wall and then looking up at the golden dome of the Rock on the same terrace felt genuinely surreal — like two worlds occupying the exact same ground, somehow not cancelling each other out.

The road south to the Dead Sea was its own kind of revelation. The landscape turns bone-dry fast — pale cliffs, cracked earth, the occasional lone palm. Then you come over a ridge and there it is: that flat blue mirror sitting 420 metres below sea level, ringed by brown hills fading into Jordan on the far shore. We stopped at a bar that proudly calls itself the lowest drinking spot on Earth, which felt like exactly the right way to mark the moment. And yes, I floated — just lay back in that impossibly salty water with a magazine, horizon stretching out, not a current pulling me anywhere.

The street art in the Negev was the surprise I hadn't planned for. Some stretch of flat-roofed buildings completely covered in murals — bold colours, unexpected faces, the kind of work that makes you slow down. Israel kept doing that: just when I had a version of it fixed in my head, something else showed up to complicate it, and I was glad.