Tel Aviv sleeps late. Jerusalem is awake at five.
One motorway separates a beach city from a walled one, and almost every famous day out in Israel leaves from one of the two. What the Dead Sea run costs, and how far south you can get before dark.
Masada, the Old City, the coast road, the market.
The four bookings a first Israeli itinerary hangs off. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The one everybody booksFrom Tel Aviv: Masada & Dead Sea Full Day Tour with Pick UpMasada by cable car, then the salt water at the lowest place on the planet. Out of Tel Aviv at six, back in time for dinner.
02Before the queuesGuided Walking Tour of the Old CityFour quarters of the walled city on foot, from Jaffa Gate down to the Western Wall. Take the early slot: by eleven the lanes are shoulder to shoulder.
03The coast road northCaesarea, Rosh Hanikra and Acre Day Trip from Tel AvivCaesarea’s Roman harbour, the sea grottoes at Rosh Hanikra and Crusader Acre, in one long drive up the Mediterranean.
04Lunch as a planCarmel Market Tasting Tour – LocaLocalCarmel Market at the eating end, ten counters between the spice sacks and the fish. Come hungry and skip breakfast.
Jerusalem: inside the walls early, below sea level after lunch.
Everything in Jerusalem →
Half a square mile inside the Ottoman walls holds the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock, and it empties out by seven in the evening. The Judean desert starts twenty minutes past the last bus stop.
Four quarters in one morning
Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Armenian quarters run into one another without a sign to tell you which is which. A guide is the difference between a maze and a map.
Bethlehem, and back the same afternoon
The Church of the Nativity is nine kilometres from the Old City and on the far side of a crossing. Group operators carry the paperwork and the permitted vehicles; a hire car does not get through.
The Dead Sea, half a day away
Ninety minutes down the Jericho road and you are lower than anywhere else on the surface of the earth. The salt finds every cut you did not know you had, so shave tomorrow.
Tel Aviv is where you sleep, eat, and leave from at six in the morning.
Nearly every big day out in the country begins with a Tel Aviv hotel pickup, which makes the city itself easy to under-book. Give it a morning: the market at the eating end, the flea lanes behind Jaffa’s clock tower, and the sea path that runs the whole way down.
Every Tel Aviv day out →
Masada at sunrise, Ein Gedi by ten, floating before noon.
The classic Israeli day out drops four hundred metres below the Mediterranean and comes back sunburnt. Three ways to build it, what each costs to board, and which city it leaves from.
The days out more travellers take than any others in Israel.
Every tour in Israel →The same handful of trips carries most of the country’s traffic: the run down to the salt, the Old City on foot, and the long drive north. Here is what each one actually involves.
1
From Tel Aviv: Masada & Dead Sea Full Day Tour with Pick Up
Travel from Tel Aviv into the Judean Desert, ride a cable car to Masada, explore King Herod’s fortress, and spend about 90 minutes at the Dead Sea. Guides such as Udi, Avi, Yuval, and Omri are known for clear storytelling and good timekeeping. Lunch is not included.
From · $117
Read our review →
2
From Tel Aviv: Jerusalem and Bethlehem Guided Day Trip
from $118
3
Masada and the Dead Sea Day Trip from Tel Aviv
from $120
4
Jerusalem, Bethlehem & Dead Sea
from $109
5
From Tel Aviv: Guided Day Trip to Nazareth & Sea of Galilee
from $98
6
From Tel Aviv: Jerusalem Old & New City Bus Tour
from $95
7
From Jerusalem: Masada & Dead Sea Full Day Tour with Pick Up
from $111
8
Masada and the Dead Sea Day Trip from Jerusalem
from $111
Two capitals, a desert, a lake, and four hundred kilometres of coast.
Israel is smaller than Wales and every one of these is a day’s drive from the next. Six places worth basing yourself in, and the best day out from each.
A Roman harbour, a Crusader port and a chalk cliff on the Lebanese border.
Drive north out of Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean gives you three things in ninety minutes: Herod’s harbour at Caesarea, the walled port at Acre that people still live inside, and the grottoes cut into the headland at Rosh Hanikra. Most operators fit all three into one day.
- 1From Tel Aviv: Caesarea, Haifa and Akko Day Tripfrom $120
- 2Caesarea, Rosh Hanikra and Acre Day Trip from Tel Avivfrom $120
- 3Walking Tour of Akko (Half-day)
Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the lake the gospels are set on.
Three of the four sites that carry the pilgrimage traffic are nowhere near Jerusalem. Bethlehem sits past a checkpoint, Nazareth is two hours north, and the Sea of Galilee is another morning beyond that.
What a day out in Israel actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. Israel is not a cheap country, but the walks and the market mornings sit a long way below the full-day drives.
Old City walks, museum entries, market tastings, bike mornings and the short hops out of Tel Aviv.
The full-day standards: Masada and the Dead Sea, Jerusalem from the coast, Nazareth and the Galilee.
Private guides, the two-day crossings into Jordan, and the once-a-trip splurges that earn it.
- 1Day Tour to Petra from Eilatfrom $219
- 22-Day Petra Tour from Jerusalemfrom $420
- 32 Day Tour to Petra and Wadi Rum from Tel Avivfrom $399
Three things that happen in Israel and almost nowhere else.
Old stones and warm sea are everywhere around this coastline. Water you cannot sink in, a cable car into a border cliff, and a crater that was never a crater are not.
Floating on the Dead Sea
The water is roughly a third mineral salt, dense enough that a body physically cannot sink in it and any cut on your legs will announce itself within seconds. The shoreline retreats about a metre a year, so the beach hotels built in the eighties now run shuttle carts down to the water. Twenty minutes in is plenty. The black mud is the part people go back for.
- 1From Tel Aviv: Masada & Dead Sea Full Day Tour with Pick Up★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,496 reviews
- 2Masada and the Dead Sea Day Trip from Tel Aviv★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,014 reviews
- 3Jerusalem, Bethlehem & Dead Sea★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 881 reviews
The grottoes at Rosh Hanikra
A cable car drops down a white chalk headland to sea caves the Mediterranean has been hollowing out for thousands of years, lit an unlikely blue-green from below. A railway tunnel cut through the rock in the Second World War runs off one of the chambers and stops dead at the border fence. On a rough day the swell closes the walkways entirely.
- 1Caesarea, Rosh Hanikra and Acre Day Trip from Tel Aviv★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 406 reviews
- 2Caesarea, Acre & Rosh Hanikra Day Trip from Jerusalem★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 78 reviews
- 3Unforgettable Tour to Caesarea, Haifa, Acre and Rosh HaNikra from Tel Aviv★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 56 reviews
Makhtesh Ramon
Forty kilometres long and five hundred metres deep, Makhtesh Ramon is neither a meteor scar nor a volcano. It is an eroded dome, a landform that occurs in the Negev, the Sinai and essentially nowhere else. Ibex work the rim road at dusk, and the sky above Mitzpe Ramon is the darkest anyone in this country can drive to.
- 1Rappelling Down the Ramon Crater Cliff★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 47 reviews
- 2Two hour guided jeep tour in to and around the Ramon crater★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 45 reviews
- 3Ramon Crater Jeep Tour from Mitzpe Ramon★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 44 reviews
Four Israeli bookings that will not wait until you land.
Most of this country can be arranged the night before over dinner. These four run on sunrise departures, a border post’s opening hours, and a calendar that shuts the whole place down once a week.
- 01From Jerusalem: Masada at Sunrise, Ein Gedi & Dead Sea TourThe sunrise run leaves Jerusalem at around three in the morning and every operator caps the minibus. There is one departure a day and it is not a decision you make at breakfast.
- 02Day Tour to Petra from EilatPetra is over the Jordanian border. The crossing wants your passport, a visa arranged in advance, and a departure time set by the border post rather than by you.
- 03From Tel Aviv: Jerusalem and Bethlehem Guided Day TripBethlehem is on the West Bank side of a checkpoint. Operators carry the permits and the vehicles that are allowed through; a hire car and good intentions do not get you in.
- 04From Tel Aviv: Jerusalem Old City & Dead Sea Guided Day TourTemple Mount opens to non-Muslim visitors for two short windows a morning and not at all on Fridays or Saturdays. Every Old City walk is timed around that, so the slot decides the day.
For twenty-five hours a week, Israel stops running.
Buses stop, the intercity trains stop, most museums lock up and a lot of restaurants close from mid-afternoon on Friday until three stars are out on Saturday. Two things keep moving: private drivers, and everywhere the sabbath is not kept. Save the Old City, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jaffa for the day nothing else does anything.
Both of Israel’s great markets are a lunch, not a shop.
Carmel Market in Tel Aviv and Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem run on the same idea: a dozen counters, one thing done properly at each, and nowhere to sit down. A guided crawl is what gets you past the stalls selling phone cases.
By place, from the coast to the crater
Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the salt, the lake: the loop most first trips make.
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