Dehydrated in the Dead Sea

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

As the bus nears the Dead Sea, the surrounding scenery grows increasingly dry and lifeless. This is actually one of the parts of the trip I’d been most excited for — not the deserted valley, the dry desert sand or these mountainous walls of red rock shrinking in the distance, but to float in this sea of salt water.

It’s the lowest place on earth, a hard fact for me to grapple with. But the deeper we descend, the…