Yes, this is the origin of my sample no. 107 IL-HD. The place is located on the Israeli shorelines of Dead Sea: Ein Gedi Spa, an amazing oasis and tourists attraction in the middle of nowhere.

The place is overhelming you by what it’s written on the shield right at the entrance: it’s the lowest place on Earth, with 418 m below sea level. We’ve been there on August 2nd, 2007 when the thermometer indicated just 47 °C. It was incredibly hot. When getting off the car, the body had to adapt to an increase of two folds in ambient temperature (from 23 to 47 °C) and it felt like the blood gets out of the body through the boiling skin.

However, plenty of people seemed to enjoy packing themselfs with the famous Dead Sea sludge. This is said to contain an impresive amount of minerals and salts and it is sold in most of the shops in Israel as soap, skin softener, shower and bathing products and so on.

But my focus was not on sludge but of course on… sand. Collecting it was not a problem at all since it was plenty of it just everywhere around us. Trying to avoid the curious look from the tourists I quickly filled a half liter bottle and we took a few photographs around.

Among many others, this was an unforgettable experience in Israel and I am more than happy for being able to also get a sand sample from there. Trying at home to dry it out was an impossible task: the sand had so much salt in it that it purely adsorbed all the water from atmosphere and therefore it never got dry.