This article first appears in Vol. 27:
Books.

I

I
know it has been a rather long business writing down all these
places one after the other, and it makes far too much to remember.
But it may help you, loving sisters, the better to picture what
happened in these places.” So scrawled Egeria, one of the
first-ever travel writers and certainly the original female
travel
writer – and yet few have ever heard of her.

Visiting the Levant area between AD 381 and 384, Egeria wrote a
first-person account of her trip addressed to her “sorores”
(sisters), which has led scholars to deduce that she was a nun.
However, she could just have easily been addressing a group of
Christian women or a troop of female siblings waiting back at home,
Little Women-style. I chanced upon the Itinerarium Egeriae while
researching a book about solo female travellers through history.
Although Marco Polo, Captain Cook, Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux
are household names, many equally intrepid female explorers have
had their adventures overlooked. I wanted to follow in the
footsteps of these pioneering women to see how solo female travel
has changed across the centuries.

Although only part of Egeria’s writing remains – her manuscript
was lost for 700 years and only an incomplete version discovered in
Italy in the 19th century – we still get an idea of her personality
and enthusiasm for exploring. She describes her “boundless
curiosity” and goes to great lengths to record the details of what
she sees. We know that she was educated, probably comfortably off,
and wanted to see the land of Genesis, the Old Testament and the
gospels. By her own admission she’s “inquisitive”, has a taste for
adventure and takes hardship in her stride.

Unlike Egeria, who made her way through Constantinople to arrive
in Jerusalem, probably by camel, I fly into Tel
Aviv, also known as the Miami of
the Middle East. Joggers and surfers are out on the sand and a
smattering of dishevelled revellers are sitting outside bars
smoking. After stopping for a lunch of Israeli salads and masabacha
– a warm hummus made with white fava beans – at the fashionable
hotel The Norman, I catch the bus to Jerusalem.
The Holy City might only be an hour from here, but as every Tel
Avivian tells me, it’s another world entirely.

Writing in Latin (and I’m indebted to John Wilkinson’s excellent
translation), Egeria states that she has come “right from the other
end of the earth” but doesn’t say exactly where home is.
However,aseventh-centuryGalicianhermitcalled Valerius wrote a
letter praising “the most blessed Egeria and her travels” so she
might well have come from the same part of Spain. Scholars think
she could have been the daughter of a merchant, which would help
explain the contacts she would have needed to organise the tents,
camels, mules and local guides necessary for desert travel in Roman
times.

When I step off the bus in Jerusalem the first thing I notice is
the clothes. Not just the uniforms of the young soldiers (every
Israeli does National Service when they leave school, so teenagers
in khakis is a common sight), but also the Hasidic Jews in their
mink hats and gold robes and a group of nuns in white habits. To
further add to the feeling of being in a play, it also happens to
be Purim – a Jewish celebration that involves Halloween-style
costumes – so I see people dressed as clowns, monks and (best of
all) a costume of a man riding a camel, who also happens to be
riding a skateboard. I’m pretty sure that’s how Egeria would have
travelled if she could have.

I head to my hotel, Villa Brown, one of a clutch of boutique hotels
that have recently opened to appeal to discerning visitors, not
just the busloads of tourists coming for religious pilgrimage. I
head straight to the central food market, Machane Yehuda, to get my
bearings, and instantly regret having eaten lunch. You can sample
food from around the globe at The Shuk, whether Yemeni wraps, sushi
or fish and chips. Eventually the smell of freshly baked dough at a
Georgian stall forces me to buy a hachapuri, a kind of calzone with
cheese.

I nibble it while wandering the streets outside the market and
quickly find myself in a very peaceful part of town. The white
washing hanging between the houses, a shop selling only black hats
and a feeling that I’ve stepped back in time tells me that this is
Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood. From here it’s not
long before the atmosphere gets livelier and the colours brighter.
Amid the pretty courtyards of Nachlaot is a vintage clothes shop, a
smattering of street art and the Barbur Gallery. It’s here that I
meet Jenna Romano. She’s originally from New York but moved to
Jerusalem to study art history. She also runs Contemporary Art in
Jerusalem, which takes visitors on tours of the city’s
contemporary-art scene, including street art and artists’
studios.

Jenna points me in the direction of the Jerusalem Artists’
House, a gallery where up-and-coming Israeli, Palestinian and
Ethiopian artists are showing their work. The castle-like structure
was once the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts and nearby Bezalel
Street is thronged with coffee shops, galleries and live music
venues such as Nocturno, where students from the nearby
architecture school hang out. For dinner that night I grab a seat
at the bar at Mona. This is the kind of place where the staff pour
you shots of ice-cold arak – “we’re going to do a little l’chaim” –
and the hand-thrown ceramic plates and cups are so beautiful you
want to lick them clean and smuggle them home.

Israeli food is renowned for being some of the best in the world
and Mona doesn’t disappoint. I try shachat – a smoky goat’s cheese
with a blue centre, served with hazelnut crackers that are so
moreish I have to request a second helping – a polpo bruschetta
with lemon verbena and chives, and a tangy red-tuna sashimi. You
know you’re in a good restaurant when even the salad is something
to write home about – a teetering pile of chervil, almonds,
radishes, grapefruit, mint and snow peas with a mandarin and Earl
Grey vinegar dressing.

The next morning I wake up early to meet Mike Smeir at Herod’s
Gate. Mike grew up in the Muslim Quarter and now runs food tours of
the Old City with a company called Urban Adventures. Although it’s
not yet 8am, behind the walls life is already pulsating. The Old
City has four distinct quarters (Muslim, Jewish, Christian and
Armenian) and many more subsets within. We enter the Afghani area
past the Indian Hospice and find men smoking shisha and playing
cards and boys carrying wooden wheelbarrows of ka’ak (a
sesame-covered bread). We grab a loaf as we walk down the steep,
narrow, cobbled alleyways to Abu Shukri restaurant. According to
Mike, it serves the best hummus in the city and judging by how many
people are huddled over red bowls on plastic chairs, he might be
right. The swirl of hummus plonked in front of us looks as creamy
as a Mr Whippy ice cream and tastes zesty and lemony, topped with
chickpeas, parsley and paprika.

We dodge groups of religious tourists singing hymns on the Via
Dolorosa and join the queue to place our palms on a smooth part of
the rock where Jesus is meant to have stumbled and rested his hand.
Mike guides me past the shouting hawkers and trundling carts to
Little Western Wall, a lesser- known, more sheltered part of the
Western Wall where people have crammed folded notes and prayers
into the crevices between the stones.

As we stand there two small boys, one in a kippah and one in a
keffiyeh, walk up hand in hand and kiss the wall together. It’s an
almost too-perfect metaphor of hope and friendship amid the ongoing
tensions in this part of the world. Armed Israeli soldiers with
crackling radios guard the gates to Temple Mount, a holy spot for
Muslims, Jews and Christians, and the site of a recent protest.

Past stalls selling cotton, herbs and antique maps we reach
Ja’far Sweets, which is bustling before prayer time at the mosque.
Mike wants me to try a traditional Palestinian sweet called knafeh,
which is cheese covered in syrup topped with pistachios. It
tastes… interesting, and I politely push it around my plate while
sipping hot, sludgy Arabic coffee. From here we make our way to the
Holy Sepulchre, the main church in Jerusalem where pilgrims are
lining up to touch the rock Jesus was crucified on and go inside
his ornate tomb. The strong smell of incense, throngs of people
visibly overcome with emotion and strings of twinkling oil lamps
and baubles make it an intense experience.

Watching this outpouring of devotion it occurs to me that Egeria
wasn’t really travelling alone. Although she’s constantly meeting
monks, nuns and bishops, she is also, of course, travelling with
God. I think of her again when Mike points out the crumbling Roman
arches stretching overhead on certain streets in the Old City, the
very arches she would have walked under. We pass an alleyway with a
sign saying “The Nun’s Ascent” in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The
limestone steps are glassy from all the feet that have polished
them – maybe Egeria’s, too.

I leave Mike and try to navigate the maze-like Arab quarter
alone to reach the Mount of Olives, which Egeria notes is actually
“a very big hill”. I pass the rock where Judas betrayed Jesus,
which Egeria also mentions, and the “graceful church” at the
bottom, along with the Garden of Gethsemane, now a rather
underwhelming patch of olive trees. Egeria stayed in Jerusalem “for
three full years”, making trips to nearby cities such as Jericho,
so I jump on a bus to the lowest and oldest city on earth. On the
way down through the hills we pass Bedouin tribes in
corrugated-iron shacks and eventually pass under a huge Coca-Cola
sign to enter Jericho, known in the Bible as the Promised Land.

Archaeologists from Italy are dusting the fortifications at the
palace of Tel Al Sultan, which dates back 10,000 years. I think
about hiking to the monastery on the Mount of Temptation, where
Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights, but the dry heat is so intense
that instead I break my own fast with a falafel sabich (stuffed
pita) with preserved lemons and aubergines and a fresh pomegranate
juice in the peaceful main square.

On the way back, ears popping from travelling 250m below sea
level, I jump off the bus near the Dead
Sea. Although Egeria remarks that it looks “like the ocean”
it’s actually a salty lake. I’ve been advised by a friend to swerve
the charmless resort towns and enter the water at a hidden spot
called Ein Kedem instead. I’m a bit hesitant getting in, imagining
that the salty water will thrust me upwards with force, but it’s
just like you’re normally floating in the sea, except with added
bounce. “Its water is extremely bitter,” notes Egeria. “Fish are
nowhere to be found in it and no ships sail there. If anyone goes
to swim in it, the water turns them upside down.”

That night, skin still silky soft from the minerals in my mud
bath, I take the bus from Jerusalem to Checkpoint 300 to reach
Bethlehem. When Egeria visited Jesus’s birthplace she entered on
foot, as it was then part of Jerusalem. Now it is part of the
Palestinian West Bank, behind a 700km dividing wall built by the
Israelis in 2002. A few people have expressed surprise that I’m
going into Palestine,
alone, as a woman. “Just don’t do it at night,” says a bartender
whom I tell of my plans – so naturally it’s pitch-black by the time
I attempt the journey.

I’m headed to Walled Off, a hotel, museum and Palestinian art
gallery right next to the wall which the artist Banksy opened in
2017. Entering the candle-lit, jazz-music playing lobby after
dragging my bags through the narrow turnstiles and dark corridors
of the checkpoint is such a jarring feeling that I can’t help
thinking of Casablanca or colonial times. The sign at reception
says “Rejection”, there’s a Grecian bust wreathed in smoke from a
tear-gas canister, cherubs in gas masks painted on the wall, a lift
jammed open with concrete breeze blocks and a note on my pillow
from Banksy saying “Welcome to Bethlehem – a place renowned since
Biblical times for its inadequate hostelry facilities – a tradition
we’re likely to continue here.”

I sleep soundly in my wonderfully chintzy pink room, only
stirring with the call to prayer. The next morning, after a
shakshuka under Banksy’s display of mounted CCTV cameras, I meet
Marwan Fararjeh for a walking tour of the wall.

There are painted slogans such as “Make Hummus Not Walls” and a
picture of Trump snogging a watchtower, and it’s not long before we
reach Aida Refugee Camp. Palestinians have been living here since
1950, displaced in the wake of the 1947-1949 war which in Hebrew is
known as “the war of liberation” and in Arabic “the Nakba”, meaning
“catastrophe”, which just about sums up the differing points of
view. Some 6,000 people now live in the camp, among them a woman
named Layla who’s selling silver jewellery made from the shells of
tear-gas canisters and olive-oil soap. There’s more street art and
a sobering list of children killed painted on a black wall.

Before I leave there’s just time to walk down Star Street
through Manger Square to reach The Church of Nativity. As I watch
pilgrims gather for mass in the spot where Jesus is said to have
been born, just as they would have when Egeria was here, I’m
reminded that both our journeys have been inspired by writing. The
Bible was her roadmap and she was following in the footsteps of
Moses and Jesus, just as I am now stepping into her shoes. By
documenting her travels Egeria hoped to conjure up her experiences
in the minds of her “loving sisters” at home. Maybe this is the
power of writing – that it can become a form of telepathy, as well
as a way of travelling through time. Hopefully I can do something
similar with my own book. Inshallah, as they say around here.