The end of the Golan Heights Trail – and Hammat Gader

Woke up at Meitzar stream, it took me about three hours to reach EinTaufik, where the trail ends. The route goes from the stream to Mevo Hama, and then turns south and goes along the cliff overlooking the Kinneret – and again, unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it too much because the visibility was poor.

Reaching the end of the trail, I carried on all the way to the hot springs of Hammat Gader – for a bath after a full week without a shower…. :)

Thus I finished the Golan Heights Trail. I must admit that it didn’t meet my expectations – for the Israel National Trail was so much better:
a. The markings – The GHT is poorly marked at certain areas, to the point where many hikers get lost
(as an anecdote it occurred to me that when someone says ‘I’m lost’ he means ‘I’m not where I wanted to be – I don’t know where am I’. The Golan Heights translation to the previous sentence is – ‘I’m in the middle of a MINE FIELD and I don’t know WHICH ONE’… :) … true, there are many mine fields in the Golan Heights, but they are all clearly marked and fenced.
b. There are way too many passages – you walk on a boring 4×4 road, o n your way to an interesting site. Obviously you had some of those on the INT, but the ratio was much better. If I had to estimate, I’d say between 40 and 60 percent (!!!) of the GHT is expandable.
c. As along the INT, there are many historical sites along the GHT – but unfortunately these sites lack even the simple road sign to explain the name of the site or what exactly  is it you’re looking at.

Hiking the GHT, you can feel the military presence in the area. There are many military bases, many mine fields. Tanks could be found along the way (probably old ones – but I don’t really know all that much about ‘em to know. I can hardly tell the Syrian Tanks from our own…). The Hermon is the meeting place of Syria, Lebanon and Israel – and Both Syria and Lebanon are hostile countries. The southern end of the heights meet Jordan. And so I believe that hiking the trail is important to every Israeli – but if I had to rank it as nothing more than a hiking trail (and I do try to keep this blog focused on nothing more than the trails, and not go into politics or personal encounters) I would rank it as an “ok” one – say 5or 6 out of 10 (the INT I would rank about 9.5, more than any other trail I ever hiked)

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