Maarat HaNetifim - Israel's Stalactite Cave

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After Maya came home from school last week talking about Maarat HaNetifim, Israel's Stalactite Cave, also called Sorek Cave, and asking to go we realized that it had in fact been years since we'd been. The last time we'd visited Maya had been an infant and Itai a young preschooler so obviously neither remembered being there. It was high time for a repeat visit.
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Our hearts sank when we arrived and saw that half the country had apparently had the same idea today but the Park authorities kept things surprisingly well organized. Despite the crowds we didn't wait more than ten minutes for the next tour and once inside didn't feel at all crowded or rushed.
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The cave itself is amazing. It's small (only 5 dunams, just over an acre) but the formations inside are incredibly dense and extraordinarily diverse, rivaling caves many times its size in other countries.
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After a short movie chronicalling the discovery of the cave just forty years ago our group went inside. Once there our guide provided a bit more explanation (and reemphasized the absolutely positively no touching rules) and pointed out some of the highlights, and then turned us loose to move through the cave (via a wooden walkway) at our own pace. Flash photography was strongly discouraged (no loss, it would have given horribly washed out glary looking images anyway) but as you can see I still managed to keep myself well amused by cranking the ISO up high and concentrating on the areas which had their own lighting.
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As an added bonus, the wildflowers were blooming all over the park, making the walk to and from the cave entrance an absolute delight. The cyclamen in particular were really at their peak. I'd never realized how often they sprout right out from a crevace in a rock. The grouping you see below had me utterly beguiled. (And in the interest of honest reporting, lest anyone think I actually know anything about flowers, my six year old had to tell me that these were cyclamen. (Actually she used the Hebrew name - rakafot - I then had to go home and look up the English translation to figure out that these were cyclamen.) Israeli schoolchildren learn about our region's native flowers in school and can identify all of the major wildflowers we see each winter (much better than their mother can, that's for sure!).
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Just 45 or so minutes from home, it really was like stepping into paradise for an afternoon. (Well, except for the little boy who decided that standing directly in front of us was the appropriate place to pee. My husband suggested he find a tree off to the side (yes, little Israeli boys pee on trees all the time, it's considered socially acceptable, but they are supposed to be at least a little bit discrete, and certainly not to pee right on the sidewalk in front of a family on a picnic bench) but the little boy insisted that his father said it was alright. We tried to ignore the fact that he was peeing just a few feet from where we were sitting having an ice cream. A few minutes later he suddenly came back and dropped his pants again, only this time his father saw him and from his reaction he most certainly had not said it was alright and proceeded to yell at him for his "disgusting behavior" (without ever bothering to explain where the child was going wrong or to suggest a better alternative). Sigh...

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