Tiberias January 20-21

The last stage of my trip was a visit to Tiberias to see the excavations there. I left the hotel in Jerusalem early in the morning of Thursday January 20 and went to the West Jerusalem bus station for the 6:30 am bus to Tiberias, which arrived at 9:00. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University, met me and took me to see her excavations at the early Islamic site in the south part of Tiberias with the impressive remains of the Friday mosque. Later in the day Nimrod Luz, a professor of cultural geography at Western Galilee College, joined us.

Katia

Katia and Nimrod Luz

In the afternoon Katia dropped me off at the church at Mount Berenice, which overlooks Tiberias.

The church at Mount Berenice and the view of Tiberias

Luckily, a couple of tourists there at the time with a car offered me a lift back to Tiberias, saving me a very long walk. I checked into a hotel on the north side of the city and that evening I walked around a bit.

The following morning, Friday January 21 I returned to Jordan. I went to the bus station for a 10:00 bus to Beth Shean, which arrived at 10:45. Rather than pay for a taxi, I then walked to the Jordan River crossing, which took an hour and fifteen minutes; I had walked that distance a couple of times previously in the late 1990s. The border crossing was routine. On the Jordanian side the only transportation option is a taxi, so I took a taxi to the bus station in Irbid and from there a bus to Amman. I arrived at ACOR in the mid-afternoon, after about five hours of total travel time.