Looking for the checkpoint

I haven't updated in a while (or at all, if you will) but a couple of incidents happened in the past few weeks that were too hilarious not to recount.

Last week I had a friend I had met on exchange way back in 2005 come visit me.  I rented a car, because it was just easier to do stuff that way, and I also missed not driving.  I was apprehensive at first, but driving around the West Bank was not as difficult as I thought it would be (except for that time we encountered a showdown between tear gas firing IDF and stone-throwing Palestinian youth... it was not so bad, but I was really worried about getting tear gassed in my own car).

On the day he left I was going to drive him to Jerusalem to get a shuttle to Ben Gurion, as obviously people living in the West Bank rarely if ever travel via Ben Gurion airport (instead they go to Amman's Queen Alia airport, which is roughly the same distance but you wouldn't know that from the voyage...for the next post!) it is a real pain in the ass to get there purely by public transit, and fairly expensive to go by taxi.

Alas my rental car was total shit - I can't rent cars from Thrifty/Hertz etc because they are not 'insured' to be driven in the West Bank for whatever god foresaken reason even though they only cost about $30/day - so I am obliged to rent from Palestinian companies who make a killing off renting out cars that may have stored dead bodies for about $50/day.  Anyway, this shite, little, Mr. Beanesque, Hyundai had some troubles with its alarm system and it needed to get repaired, it  didn't take that long but it meant that I had to drive my friend directly to Ben Gurion.

Rather than go through Jerusalem and all the traffic at Qalandia checkpoint and the traffic in Jerusalem itself, there is a more 'direct' route between Ramallah and Tel Aviv (which are both north of Jerusalem anyways) that goes through some lovely countryside in the West Bank before eventually (well, "eventually" as you will see) meeting with the 443 highway that  connects Modi'in - one of the largest illegal settlements in the West Bank - to Tel Aviv.

I had been on this route twice, once when I took a taxi from Ramallah to Ben Gurion and once when driving back from Tel Aviv to Ramallah.  I used the route I remembered from that latter journey, which was more or less the same as the route from the former journey.  More or less until, after driving through some breathtaking West Bank scenery, I wasn't really sure HOW to join up with the Israeli roads that would lead me to the highway.  I was at the point from that journey between Tel Aviv and Ramallah where I had exited off the 443 to get to Ramallah, but could not figure out how to do the inverse - get back on the highway.  At the exit there were some Israeli soldiers posted, for some reason.  There were also some arabs just hanging around, most people would think this would be a flashpoint for trouble but not at all, the arabs were speaking hebrew with them and sharing cigarettes. So I asked them for help,  most of them could not speak english (!) but one of them did.  He was a very polite and sweet kid but had a hard time wrapping his head around how I was a foreigner living in Ramallah with Israeli plates on my car (most Israeli's have no clue how the West Bank works really, even those posted in it).  When I asked if I could go to the right he responded "but this is an Arab settlement!" (it's best heard in my imitation of the Israeli accent, but alas this will do.) I told him I didn't have any problem with that, but it seems it wouldn't have helped me anyway.  So he said "ok we'll call an Arab for you, he'll show you how to get to the highway".  And indeed he did call an Arab, explained the situation to him and I followed this guy in my car.  He led me to a road that at some point led to the highway but was now all blocked up - which we simply drove around and through a ditch (I got him to drive that part!) and then onto the road that led to the highway.  For the price of 30 NIS and 5 cigarettes I found a highly illegal detour into Israel.  The best part was that, as I best understood, this illegal route was completely sanctioned by those soldiers!