A chance meeting but no coincidence!!

Our new friends Doron and Vivienne from Israel:

Trevor had made contact before we left home with the Israli BMW Bikers club and had got a few responses back, one being from Doron who rides a GS1200 also, well they say there is no such thing as coincidences and I believe that is true, read on to find out why. 

Our ride up from Taba was beautiful and uneventful albeit some interesting sites along the way which I will talk about after we have moved to the next country! We arranged to meet up with Doron at the lookout to the Crater on our way up from Taba to his home town of Be-er Sheva, we arrived on time and he was waiting for us,  we jumped on the bikes after a brief explanation of this crater and then a stop for a coffee to get acquainted, he suggested that after the coffee we follow him into Be-er Shiva about an hour away as he wanted to take us to a famous Humus spot for lunch.  Great, so thats what we did, on the way he stopped occasionally to tell us about the different sites we were seeing, one that stuck with me was the Kibbutz that was where Israeli First President, Ben Gurion lived out his life after retiring from presidency.  This man ran as President from day 1, 1949 until 1963 until his retirement and was said to be a man who gave Israel “what they needed” not “what they wanted” and was considered to be a “true Leader’ that everyone respected and was voted, in Time Magazine, as one of the 100 most important people in the 20th century, this intrigued me and I wanted to learn more about this man.

Our stop for lunch and Humus was great, a large bowl of humus each, complete with a hard boiled egg, chick peas, tomatoes, peppers and pita, very good, boy were we full!  At lunch we discussed where we could stay while we were there and he decided that we could stay with him and Vivienne at their home in the Kibbutz, what fun, I didn’t even know what a Kibbutz was, exactly, sure I have heard of them but not a clue what they are.  Doron told me the philosophy behind a Kibbutz is this “give as much as you can and take as little as you need”, wow how nice.  His partner Vivienne had come from Brazil 20 odd years ago at the age of 28 in search of a change from the rat race and decided to settle here at this Kibbutz.   Doron showed us around and basically its a village of about 600 people, young and old, children too all living peacefully together, helping each other out, they have a few business on the property, big business like Milk Farming and a Styrofoam plant, they have a small grocery shop, a dentist, doctor and a swimming pool too.  They all live in their own homes but its a bit like a strata at home, everyone pays into it for the grounds and common areas, they say the structure of it is changing these days but still its a lovely place to live. 

We enjoyed a lovely evening of story telling and laughter and great food, amongst our stories was of course our route since leaving home, to our surprise we discovered that we had met Doron before, in Morocco.  He and a friend had gone to Morocco to ride their GS’s but had been turned away, they were told it was too dangerous for them to be in Morocco (with Israeli plates) so were turned back to Spain, they didn’t give up they returned the next day and rented a car and got thru.  While we were riding in Morocco we stopped to take pictures and a black car stopped and two guys were asking us if we were ok, little did we know they stopped us because they were bikers too, “we had managed to get our GS’s in to ride Morocco, Mucho Jealous!! Anyway after comparing stories and dates on our pictures, we actually have their car in our pictures,  we concurred that indeed we had met before, not only that but other dates on pictures show that we had followed each other around Europe for 3 months before also, sometimes in the same place on the same day, so I guess we were just meant to meet, how cool is that, no co-incidences in life.

We didn’t go to bed that night till 1:30am we had so much to talk about and so much in common it was a delicious evening!  Doron made us breakfast and although we were going to leave around 9am we didn’t leave until 11:30, just too much to talk about, this is our favourite part of the trip, meeting the people and these two were no exception, great energy and great fun and we will meet again soon.