Dead Sea Area

I still haven't developed a good way of posting pictures to my blog, but I can still stick them in a Yahoo Photos album and make it public. Here are some from Madaba and the Dead Sea.

1.) "Moabite Stele" - This is the earliest artifact which mentions Israel.
2.) "Madaba Mosaic Map" - Madaba is famous for its mosaics, and this one on the floor of a church is perhaps the most famous of all, a mosaic map of the Holy Land. You can see the setting here from someone with a better camera than I had.
3.) "Sea Level Marker" - This is at the hot springs, and shows where sea level is. The drop in altitude in this area is so severe it's like landing in an airplane.
4.) "Blazing Hot River of Fire and Death" - Term coined by another person in our group, this is one of the hot springs .
5.) "Hot Spring Falls 1" - self-explanatory
6.) "Hot Spring Falls 2" - self-explanatory
7.) "Shore of Dead Sea" - Note the visible salt along the edges. In the distance, you see our driver. He is a fairly wealthy farmer who knows the owner of the place we stayed in Madaba, and as a sideline drives people from the hotel to the hot springs, Dead Sea, and Mt. Nebo. Our encounter was amusing: Earlier in the day, a shopkeeper had volunteered to drive us to the hotel because it was on the other side of town. We accepted, but the police came and stopped us believing that the shopkeeper was acting as an illegal taxi. Once at the hotel, we met this guy, made our arrangements, and were in his van waiting for him when the same police came again. This time they just wanted to tell us the shopkeeper had been cleared, and everything was fine. The irony, of course, is that we were now actually in an illegal taxi preparing to depart.