Come with me into the Israel most people never see.
We're off the road most of the day, in the open jeep. You'll come back dusty, which is the point. We stop a lot — at a ruin, a spring, sometimes just to boil water on the tailgate for coffee, or tea from sage we picked along the way.
Wherever we stop you'll learn about what happened there — on the ground where it happened, not pointed at from a car window. Rough, remote country is where I'm most at home, so I can take you further out than most tours bother to go.
Low chalk hills south of Beit Shemesh. We climb the ruins above the valley where David fought Goliath, then crawl into the caves people dug to hide from Rome.
Plan this dayForested hills just west of Jerusalem, shaded and cool even in summer. We take the dirt tracks down to a spring in the trees, past the railway line they ran up to Jerusalem a century ago.
Plan this dayCross the ridge east of Jerusalem and the green is gone in minutes — steep climbs and drops to a cliff over the Dead Sea, Jordan across the water. We stop at Azazel, the cliff the scapegoat was sent off on Yom Kippur.
Plan this day
I'm Mendel Shaffier. I grew up out here — hiking and climbing into the back corners of the country most people never see. I trained as a medic in the army, and that comes with me on every tour: I read terrain fast and rough ground is my comfort zone.
People ask why I don't drive something newer. This one's a Sufa — the jeep the army had built for itself up in Nazareth. It ran for years before I got my hands on it. Almost nothing on it to break, and narrow enough for tracks a new jeep can't fit down. I've put a lot of work into it, and I wouldn't swap it for anything straight off the lot.
I do this because I love it. Most people never see the parts of this country I grew up in, and I like being the one who takes them there.
Tell me who's coming and what you're after, and I'll build the day around it. The jeep takes seven plus me; for a bigger group, or another part of the country, I bring in other guides I trust.